Mendi Glik, a columnist and commentator, focuses on Israeli politics, current affairs and cultural trends. A software developer, he is the founder and editor-in-chief of Opli, an international technology and photonics magazine. Reach him @MendiGlik.
(Oct. 20, 2026 / JNS)
Recently, former President Barack Obama claimed that Israel “took the land” from the Palestinians and has “ceded moral ground” in its pursuit of security. These serious allegations demand a reckoning.
I am sure that Obama isn’t an antisemite. After all, as president, he was surrounded by plenty of Jewish advisers and staffers, though mostly of the progressive variety whose affection for the Jewish state is remarkably understated.
Before diving into the cold, hard facts of international law, there is a fundamental truth that Obama and his ideological soulmates seem willfully to ignore: Israel belongs to the Jewish people because God promised it to them.
As millions of Jews in synagogues around the world will read in the Torah this coming Shabbat, God declared to Abraham: “To your offspring I will give this land.” Now that we have clarified this foundational truth, we can move on.
First, there are a few undeniable historical facts: In 1867, the famed American author Mark Twain visited the region and recorded his observations in The Innocents Abroad. He described the territory of Palestine as a desolate, ruined expanse, largely devoid of inhabitants.
Decades later, on Nov. 2, 1917, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, pledging support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. At the San Remo Conference in April 1920, this principle was codified into international law, forming the legal bedrock for the British Mandate. San Remo officially recognized the historic connection of the Jewish people to the Land and granted binding legal validation to the creation of their national home.
As for the name “Palestine” itself, its origins have nothing to do with Arab heritage. Following the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 C.E., the Roman Emperor Hadrian, enraged by Jewish resistance, renamed the region “Syria Palaestina” and erected the pagan city of Aelia Capitolina atop the ruins of Jerusalem, hoping to sever the Jewish people’s bond to their ancestral homeland. “Palestine” was a Roman geopolitical construct, not an Arab state.
Fast-forward to modern legal precedents: In 2012, a commission headed by former Israeli Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy examined the legal status of Judea and Samaria under international law. The Levy Report concluded that the classical laws of belligerent occupation do not apply to these territories. Why? Because Judea and Samaria were never a recognized, legitimate part of any sovereign Arab nation.
When Jordan illegally annexed Judea and Samaria following Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, Britain was virtually the only Western nation to grant formal recognition to it. Consequently, when Israel fought for its survival in the 1967 Six-Day War, it repelled aggression from Jordan, Egypt and Syria—sovereign state actors. It did not “take land” from a non-existent Palestinian state.
Furthermore, long before 1948, Jewish pioneers purchased land legally and systematically through official transactions recorded in Ottoman and British land registries. The narrative that Israel simply “took the land” collapses under the weight of both private property records and international law.
We are now just weeks away from the Hebrew month of Kislev, when Jews around the world celebrate Chanukah. Obama knows this holiday intimately, having hosted lavish White House Chanukah parties complete with latkes, kosher caterers and warm speeches. Yet while enjoying the festivities, he appears to have missed the foundational story of what he was celebrating.
More than 2,000 years ago, when the Seleucid king Antiochus VII demanded that the Jews yield their land, Simon the Hasmonean issued a timeless response recorded in the book of Maccabees: “We have neither taken other men’s land, nor hold that which belongs to others, but the inheritance of our fathers, which was wrongfully held by our enemies for a time. But we, having opportunity, hold fast the inheritance of our fathers.”
In 1948, after two millennia of bitter exile, the Jewish people finally returned to their sovereign ancestral home in the Land of Israel. Jews did not “take land” from anyone, nor do they hold foreign property.
Do not lecture us on morality, Mr. Obama. The Land of Israel belongs to Am Yisrael, the nation of Israel. It’s time to open a history book, drop the false narratives and respect the undisputed truth.