Barack Obama Denounces Israel for ‘Taking Land’ From Palestinians

Barack Obama recently made the news — the awful news — for a speech he made on October 13 at Queen’s University in Belfast, where he was being awarded an honorary doctorate. Christine Douglass-Williams wrote about this here, and more on Obama’s disgraceful performance can be found here: “‘Not as hopeful as I want to be’: Barack Obama warns Israeli right-wing shift threatens peace,” i24News, October 15, 2026:

Obama said he was “not as hopeful as I want to be in the short term” given the “aftermath of what’s happened in Gaza and the nature of political changes that have taken place in Israel,” when asked how peace could come to the region.

What’s “happened in Gaza”? The Jewish state has been fighting Hamas, that carried out the atrocities on October 7, 2023, when 1,200 people were tortured, mass raped, girls and women were stabbed in their vaginas and had their breasts sliced off, while men had heir genitalia cut off, and both men and women had their eyes gouged out. Babies were decapitated, whole families were tied together with wire and then set alight. Can anyone blame Israel from going after the Hamas killers in Gaza? Obama could have at least mentioned those atrocities, said that he understood the fury in Israel, and that he supported the IDF’s campaign to ensure that Hamas never will threaten Israel again, but instead, he simply alluded to “what’s happened in Gaza,” just the way that Ilhan Omar once described 9/11 as a moment when “some people did something.”

“Right now, I think that the anger, the strengthening of right-wing forces inside of Israel, the settler movement, the constant changing of the facts on the West Bank, the continued suffering that’s taking place in Gaza,” he said.

Every phrase is venomously directed at Israel, not at Hamas. It is the “anger” in Israel that is to be blamed for the continued violence in Gaza, and not the violence coming from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The phrase “strengthening of right-wing forces” sullies the Jewish state as being run by beyond-the-pale wild-eyed Jewish extremists. The “changing of the facts” in what Obama calls the “West Bank” (Judea and Samaria) is merely the Jewish state building new housing on land it has every right to build on, for Judea and Samaria, where Jews have lived for the past 3000 years, are part of the territory that the League of Nations included in the Mandate for Palestine — the very mandate of which Obama clearly has no knowledge.

“I think the hardening of attitudes inside of Israel after October 7 means that we have to probably work for a genuine cessation of violence and relief for the people of Gaza as a step, then to even talk about the kinds of long-lasting peace that you described earlier, and it pains me, and it should pain everyone.”

Israel is doing just that: trying to impose a “cessation of violence” by forcing Hamas to disarm. As for the “long-lasting peace” Obama refers to, that will always be an impossible goal, given the Muslim view that any land that Muslims once possessed must forever remain Muslim. Even if Israel were somehow squeezed back within the indefensible 1949 armistice lines, leaving it with a nine-mile-wide waist from Qalqilya to the sea, and thus vulnerable to an invader from the east that could cut Israel in two within a matter of hours, before Israeli’s reservists could be assembled, that would not be an end to the violence. In fact, such an outcome would whet, not sate, Arab appetites. A “state of Palestine” would not lead to a permanent peace, but merely provide the Palestinians with a new base from which to continue to make war on the hated Jews.

In that Belfast speech, Obama described the Israelis as having “taken the land” from the Palestinians. That is an astonishing claim. He appears not to know that until the 1948 war, every dunam the Jews possessed in the Land of Israel had been bought, often at exorbitant prices, from Arab and Turkish owners. And after the 1949 war, Israel built on state and waste lands, on other properties bought from Arab owners, and also took over properties that their owners had abandoned during the 1948 war. The Israeli state understandably took these over, in a reasonable response to the seizure of vast properties that 850,000 Jews owned in Arab lands; those Jews had had to flee for their lives because of the many pogroms that took place across the Arab world after the “Nakba.”

With that one phrase, accusing the Israelis of having “taken the land” of the Palestinians, the mask is ripped off, and Barack Obama’s want of sympathy for, and failure to understand, the Jewish state’s rights, has now been made clear to all. No one should be surprised. Obama spent twenty years attending the church of Reverend Jeremiah Wright — a friend of the famously antisemitic Louis Farrakhan and a virulent antisemite in his own right — apparently without feeling the slightest unease. He quit Wright’s church only when he was preparing to run for the Presidency. He has always had a cold heart for Israel. In 2016, he had the U.S. abstain from a vote in the UN Security Council on Resolution 2334, that condemned Israel for building settlements in Judea and Samaria, thus allowing it to pass 14-0. This was the first time that an American administration has refused to veto an anti-Israel resolution in the Security Council.