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

Jerusalem Post columnist Michael Freund excoriates former US President Barack Obama for a Belfast speech that he says rewrites Israel's history, portraying Jewish return as land theft while ignoring 3,000 years of Jewish connection to the land, the Balfour Declaration, and archaeological evidence. Freund also condemns Obama's framing of Hamas's October 7 massacre as a failed political strategy.

Jerusalem Post columnist Michael Freund sharply criticizes former US President Barack Obama for a speech delivered in Belfast on October 13, 2026, accusing him of rewriting Jewish and Israeli history. Freund argues that Obama portrayed the Jewish people's return to the Land of Israel as an act of taking Palestinian land, while downplaying the 3,000-year-old Jewish connection to the land, including the two Temples in Jerusalem and centuries of Jewish longing for Zion. The column cites archaeological evidence such as the Tel Dan Stele, the Balfour Declaration, and the League of Nations Mandate to support the Jewish claim. Freund also condemns Obama's characterization of Hamas's October 7 massacre, in which approximately 1,200 people were killed and 251 kidnapped, as a tactic unlikely to produce meaningful change, arguing this reduces a moral atrocity to a tactical mistake. The piece asserts that Palestinian rejectionism predates 1948 and notes that Jordan and Egypt did not establish a Palestinian state during their control of the West Bank and Gaza.