Netanyahu And Obama Reignite Decade-Old Feud Over Israel’s Right To Its Land

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu struck back at former President Barack Obama on Friday, rejecting Obama’s claim that Jews seized land from its inhabitants when they founded Israel and reopening one of the most bitter rivalries of the Obama years.

“The Jewish people are not foreign occupiers in the land of our forefathers,” Netanyahu said in a video posted on X. “Our history is not a colonial enterprise. Our land is not stolen land.”

The Jewish people’s right to their own state in their ancestral homeland is non-negotiable.

Watch: https://t.co/uMWfObAMaJ

— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) October 16, 2026

“This is our homeland; it’s called Judea. That’s where Jews come from. We’ve been attached to it for thousands of years,” he added.

The prime minister called the remarks “regrettable” but never named Obama. The former president made them Tuesday during a paid onstage interview with Irish journalist Susan McKay at the O2 Arena in Belfast, Northern Ireland, before a crowd of about 7,000, according to the New York Post. Hours earlier, Queen’s University Belfast had given him an honorary doctorate.

Obama granted that Jews had suffered persecution “for millennia,” much of it in Europe, and had good reason to seek refuge. Then he added: “What is also undeniable is that they took land off people and they were excessive. And those people understandably said, ‘This is injustice and I want my land back.'”

He also said Israel had “ceded moral ground” by leaning on its military edge instead of compromise. He said he had made that case to Netanyahu directly while in office.

Netanyahu said Israel is not the obstacle to peace. He blamed the refusal of “our enemies, and America’s enemies” to accept a Jewish state “in any boundaries.”

The exchange revives a feud that shaped both men’s time in power. In 2011, Netanyahu lectured Obama against using Israel’s pre-1967 borders as a basis for negotiations. In 2015, he went before Congress to argue against the nuclear agreement Obama was then negotiating with Iran. And he condemned the administration’s decision in December 2016 to let a UN Security Council resolution against Israeli settlements pass.

The latest clash comes ten days before Israelis vote in an October 27 election widely seen as a referendum on Netanyahu’s leadership.