Obama: Israel’s Founding Was an ‘Injustice’

Former United States President Barack Obama claimed during an interview last Tuesday in Belfast, Northern Ireland, that the State of Israel is illegitimate. He said the founding of the nation “took land off people and [the Arabs] were expelled. And those people understandably said, This is injustice and I want my land back.”

• Obama also claimed that Israel had “ceded moral ground” in its war against Hamas and had a rationale of “our security will depend on us simply doing whatever we need and taking whatever we want.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded on X: “Our land is not stolen land. This is our homeland. It’s called Judea. That’s where Jews come from. We’ve been attached to it for thousands of years.”

The true history: Britain conquered the Holy Land from Ottoman and German forces during World War i, soon after the Balfour Declaration dedicated the British Empire to reestablish a homeland for the Jewish people. The United Nations later used Britain’s plans as a basis for partitioning the land between Jewish and Arab states in 1948.

• The original partition plan gave Israel significantly less land than its internationally recognized borders today. Israel wasn’t supposed to control cities like Jerusalem and Beersheba. The Jews accepted the UN plan.
• The Arabs meanwhile rejected the plan. Neighboring Arab countries that weren’t even part of the process invaded the land with the goal of annihilating the Jews there. The Jews instead pushed their attackers out and used that land to form the State of Israel.

This is all common knowledge. Obama was not making his comments out of historical ignorance. Instead, he was continuing a narrative he promoted when he was president: From 2009 to 2017, he did everything he could to oppose Israel.

• He helped orchestrate a Muslim Brotherhood takeover in Egypt, turning Israel’s closest ally in the Arab world into an enemy.
• He created the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, bringing Israel’s greatest enemy into the international community, not only saving its economy and thereby its regime but also giving it a path to build a nuclear weapons program.
• Through diplomatic lobbying and action in the United Nations, he pressured Israel to make lopsided agreements with the Palestinians.

President Obama has genuine antipathy for the Jewish state and everything it represents. He hasn’t had the same platform to attack Israel as he had during his presidency, but his lobby against Israel all these years later is still worth watching. Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry explains why in Chapter 2 of his free booklet The King of the South.