Barack Obama’s Belfast speech was a shameful, distorted rewrite of Israel's history - opinion

Barack Obama has apparently discovered a new historical crime: the Jewish people stole their own homeland.

That, at least, is the impression left by his latest attempt to rewrite Middle Eastern history.

Speaking in Belfast on October 13, the former American president managed to turn the Jewish people’s return to the Land of Israel into a story of persecuted European Jews who sought refuge, took Palestinian land, and provoked an understandable demand to get it back.

Never mind 3,000 years of Jewish history, two Temples in Jerusalem, or centuries of Jewish longing for Zion. In Obama’s telling, the Jews somehow became interlopers in the very land where their national story began.

“The Jewish people, for millennia, were oppressed, discriminated against, killed,” he said. They “understandably sought a refuge” but “took land off people, and they were excessive.” Palestinians, he added, “understandably said, ‘This is injustice, and I want my land back.’”

Obama made little effort to explain the Jewish people’s ancient connection to the land. Instead, he presented their return to their ancestral patrimony primarily as an act of injustice.

Let’s start with the most basic fact that Obama chose to downplay: the Jewish people are indigenous to the Land of Israel.

More than 3,000 years ago, the Israelites had already established themselves in the Land. By the 10th century BCE, they had formed a kingdom, developed their own language, and centered their national and religious life on Jerusalem. According to the biblical account, King David made the city his capital, and his son King Solomon built the First Temple there.

That is not a late European invention. It is a starting point of Jewish history.

The archaeological record provides striking evidence. The Tel Dan Stele, a ninth-century BCE stone monument discovered in northern Israel in 1993, contains an ancient Aramaic inscription referring to the “House of David.” It is the earliest known reference to David’s royal dynasty outside the Bible.

Hebrew inscriptions, Israelite seals, and the remains of ancient fortifications and settlements appear throughout the land.

After the Babylonian exile ended in 516 BCE, Jews returned and rebuilt the Temple.

Roman ruins, the Western Wall, coins from the Jewish revolts against Rome, and the Dead Sea Scrolls all attest to the Jewish people’s deep historical roots in the Land of Israel.

Even after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE and suppressed the Bar-Kochba revolt, Jews never severed their connection to the land. Communities persisted in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias – the four holy cities. Jewish legal and religious life continued there.

For centuries, Jews prayed facing Jerusalem, invoked Zion in their daily prayers, and ended the Passover Seder with the words “Next year in Jerusalem.” The connection was not a modern recovery of ancient memory. It was never broken.

Nor did Zionism begin as a desperate European response to Hitler. The First Aliyah began in 1882, bringing thousands of Jewish pioneers back to the Land of Israel. And in 1897, Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress, decades before the Holocaust.

Jewish pioneers purchased land from Arab owners and built farms, towns, and thriving agricultural communities. To reduce this remarkable enterprise to simple theft, as the former president effectively did, is a gross distortion of history.

OBAMA SKIPPED the diplomatic record, too.

In 1917, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration endorsing a Jewish national home. Five years later, the League of Nations Mandate explicitly recognized “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and the grounds for “reconstituting their national home” there.

The word “reconstituting” is important. The League of Nations was acknowledging the Jewish people’s preexisting connection to the land, not creating a new one.

Then came November 29, 1947.

The UN voted to partition British Mandatory Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. Jewish leaders accepted the plan. Arab leaders rejected it.

That refusal was hardly new. In 1937, Britain’s Peel Commission had also proposed partition. Zionist leaders accepted partition as a basis for further negotiations, while Arab leaders rejected it outright. A decade later, another chance for two states met much the same fate.

Violence followed, and when Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, neighboring Arab armies invaded. The nascent Jewish state fought for its survival.

Israel’s Declaration of Independence even appealed to its Arab inhabitants to help build the new state as equal citizens and extended a hand of peace to neighboring countries. That hardly fits Obama’s account of a nation conceived simply as an instrument of dispossession.

The fact is that there was no sovereign Palestinian state that Israel overthrew in 1948. There was, however, an internationally proposed Arab state that the Arab leadership refused to accept.

Israel also absorbed hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees driven from Arab lands after 1948. Yet while Israel integrated these refugees into its society, most Arab states refused to grant Palestinian refugees citizenship, leaving generations in a state of uncertainty.

And the rejection did not end in 1948. For nearly two decades, Jordan controlled Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem, while Egypt administered Gaza. Neither established a Palestinian state.

Obama would have his audience believe that Palestinian rejectionism was simply a response to Jewish dispossession. But the historical record clearly tells a very different story.

MORE DISTURBING still was Obama’s treatment of Palestinian violence.

Speaking about Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, Obama declared that “you could not have designed something that was less likely to produce meaningful change.”

Think about that.

When terrorists murder approximately 1,200 people and kidnap 251, the principal issue is not whether their actions will produce meaningful political change. It is that they committed an act of unimaginable barbarity.

By discussing the massacre in terms of its political effectiveness, Obama risks reducing a moral atrocity to a tactical mistake. Would the slaughter have been any less reprehensible had Hamas managed to advance its political objectives?

Indeed, no political claim, no matter how loudly asserted, confers a license to murder families in their homes or drag hostages into Gaza.

And terrorism did not begin with Israel’s founding, let alone the 1967 war. In 1929, Arab rioters murdered 67 Jews in Hebron, destroying an ancient Jewish community nearly two decades before independence.

WHAT OBAMA did in Belfast was more than distort Israel’s history. He turned the descendants of ancient Israel into trespassers in their own homeland, while treating the massacre of Jews as a failed political strategy.

Obama is, of course, entitled to his own opinions. But he is not entitled to his own version of history.

The Jewish people lived in the Land of Israel long before Barack Obama entered the world stage. And they will still be there long after his shameful revisionism has been forgotten.■

The writer served as deputy communications director under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.