Netanyahu Answers Obama’s Belfast Attack: ‘We’re Not the Belgians in the Congo, We’re Jews in Judea’

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has answered Barack Obama. In an English-language video posted to X on Friday, October 16, Netanyahu rejected the former president’s claim, made three days earlier in Belfast, that Israel “took land off people,” telling him that “the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers in the land of our forefathers.”

It was a pointed, personal rebuke of a former American president, and it arrived eleven days before Israelis go to the polls.

What Obama said in Belfast

On the evening of Tuesday, October 13, Obama appeared before roughly 7,000 people at Belfast’s O2 arena for a paid speaking event, a sit-down conversation with the Northern Irish writer and journalist Susan McKay. Earlier that day, Queen’s University Belfast had given him an honorary degree, and he had praised the Belfast Agreement as a model of peace.

When the conversation turned to the Middle East, Obama offered what he presumably considered a balanced account. He acknowledged that “the Jewish people, for millennia, were oppressed, discriminated against, killed” and that “Europe was responsible for much of it,” so they “understandably sought a refuge.” Then he pivoted. Israel, he said, “took land off people,” and those people “understandably said, ‘This is injustice and I want my land back,'” according to The Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post. (The outlets’ renderings of the rest of that sentence differ: The Times of Israel reported that people “were expelled,” while The Jerusalem Post reported that Obama called Israel “excessive.”)

He went on to lecture the Jewish state about its conduct. “If the attitude of Israel is, now that we are the strongest, the most technologically advanced in the region, then our security will depend on us simply doing whatever we need and taking whatever we want,” he said, as reported by The Jerusalem Post. “That may work short-term… but you have ceded moral ground if that is the position you take.”

According to The Irish Times, Obama said the citizenry of Israel “has to rethink, to reimagine” how its children and grandchildren will live in the region, and asked whether Israelis would be content to live behind walls and “wipe out everybody around you.” He called for stopping the “current ongoing encroachment into the West Bank.” He did tell Palestinians they cannot “outkill, outweaponise the Israelis,” and he said Hamas’s October 7 attack was the least likely thing imaginable to produce meaningful change. But the weight of the lecture fell on Israel.

Netanyahu’s answer

Netanyahu opened his video by calling Obama’s remarks a “regrettable statement,” according to The Jerusalem Post. Then he went straight at the premise.

“The Jewish people are not foreign occupiers in the land of our forefathers,” he said. “Our history is not a colonial enterprise. Our land is not stolen land. This is our homeland.”

He named it. “It’s called Judea. That’s where Jews come from. And we’ve been attached to it for thousands of years.”

And then came the line that will outlive the news cycle. Contrasting Israel with the European empires that actually did conquer distant lands, Netanyahu said, as quoted by The Jerusalem Post: “the Dutch in Indonesia… the Belgians in the Congo, we’re Jews in Judea.”

That is the whole argument in one sentence. The Dutch and the Belgians were Europeans ruling peoples on other continents, with no ancestral tie to the land. Jews in Judea are, as Netanyahu put it, where Jews come from. Whatever one thinks about any particular border, the colonial label does not fit a people living in the land their name comes from.

Who actually refuses peace

Netanyahu then turned to the question Obama skipped. “The obstacle to peace is not Israel,” he said, according to The Times of Israel. The obstacle, he argued, is the enemies’ “refusal to recognize the Jewish people’s right to a state of our own, in any boundary,” as The Jerusalem Post reported.

He tied that hostility directly to the United States. “We are the ‘Little Satan,’ you are the ‘Great Satan,'” he said, a reference to the Iranian regime’s longstanding names for Israel and America. The point lands hard: Israel and America share the same enemies, and those enemies do not distinguish between them. Obama’s Belfast remarks did not dwell on that.

Netanyahu closed with a warning. “A peace built on illusions will crash against the rocks of Middle Eastern reality,” he said, and Israel “will not gamble with its survival to accommodate those who refuse to accept the facts of history.” In a written post accompanying the video, he added that the Jewish people’s right to their own state in their ancestral homeland is non-negotiable.

Why it matters now

Israel’s general election is set for October 27, 2026. Netanyahu’s rebuttal is unmistakably aimed at a domestic audience as much as at Obama, and it plants the prime minister on ground his voters care deeply about: that the Jewish claim to the land is not a colonial claim.

It also says something about the American political scene. Speaking to a paying audience abroad, a former U.S. president is still describing Israel’s founding as taking land from others, three years after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. The Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, killed about 1,200 people and took 251 hostages into Gaza.

Obama did say that seven million Palestinians and seven million Jews “aren’t going anywhere,” and that is true. But the conclusion runs both ways. The Jews of Israel are not going anywhere either, because they are not visitors. They are home.

Three thousand years of Jewish history in Judea does not need a permission slip from a former president speaking in Belfast.

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