Obama’s Version of Jewish History: When the Conquered Became Occupiers

In January 1904, Father John Creagh stood before his congregation in Limerick and began with a question about Christian charity. Weren’t Christians obliged to love their fellow man, even their enemies? Of course, he answered, but charity must never interfere with the law of self-preservation. Having established this convenient exception, he turned his attention to the town’s tiny Jewish community, whom he portrayed as a threat to Irish society.

What followed became known as the Limerick Pogrom. Jews were assaulted, threatened, and subjected to an economic boycott that lasted approximately two years. Families who had already fled persecution elsewhere found themselves packing up and leaving again.

I wrote about this in The Times of Israel in 2021. What struck me then was the ease with which a priest could dress up antisemitism as concern for his congregation’s welfare. I certainly never imagined I would revisit the subject because of something an American president had said in Ireland. Yet here we are.

And Obama chose Belfast, of all places. Across the island of Ireland, anti-Israel demonstrations have become a recurring feature of public life, while relations between Israel and the Irish government had deteriorated so dramatically that Israel recalled its ambassador in May 2024 and closed its embassy in Dublin that December, citing what it described as extreme anti-Israel policies. The Irish government rejected that accusation. Then, in October 2025, republican activists in Belfast displayed a banner depicting an armed militant and celebrating the October 7 Hamas massacre as an uprising. Local politicians condemned it, but the spectacle was appalling. Apparently, the slaughter of Jewish civilians could be repackaged as resistance, complete with a revolutionary slogan.

Into this atmosphere stepped Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, ready to deliver another lesson in morality. Then on October 13, 2026, in conversation with journalist Susan McKay, Obama acknowledged that Jews had suffered persecution for millennia, much of it at Europe’s hands. They understandably sought refuge in a land with historic Jewish ties, he explained. But then came his assertion that they “took land off people.”

Interestingly, the published accounts differ over his next words. Hot Press reported that Obama said “they were excessive,” while The Times of Israel, citing The Irish Times, reported “they were expelled.” The distinction matters, although both versions describe him presenting the Palestinian demand for the return of land as understandable.

There it was. Europe persecuted the Jews, the Jews sought refuge, and in securing it, they became responsible for somebody else’s dispossession. What a wonderfully economical account of Jewish history. A few sentences, and almost everything that preceded modern Zionism had disappeared. Poof. Gone.

What disappeared from this remarkably convenient account was the fact that Jews had never ceased to live in the land, despite centuries of conquest and foreign rule. Nor did it account for the ancient Jewish communities of the wider Middle East, whose history had absolutely nothing to do with European persecution. Obama had managed to make Jewish national restoration sound principally like the arrival of desperate Europeans in a country where their people had barely existed. Once you tell the story that way, portraying the Jews who returned as intruders becomes remarkably easy. Rather clever, that. Except you cannot erase an inconvenient history simply because it interferes with a perfectly packaged moral argument.

Obama acknowledged a historical connection to the land. Lucky us. Apparently, Jewish history deserves a polite mention, provided it doesn’t interfere with the conclusion.

I am certainly not suggesting that Obama’s remarks were equivalent to Father Creagh’s sermons. Creagh incited hostility against Jews. Obama condemned Hamas and advocated nonviolence. But the comparison raises an interesting question about the moral language influential men employ when discussing the Jewish people.

Who is entitled to invoke self-preservation, and who is expected to apologize for it?

Consider the Holocaust in Obama’s account. He did not deny it, nor did he dismiss the persecution of European Jews. But the sequence of his argument leaves the impression that Jewish sovereignty was chiefly a consequence of Europe’s crimes, as though six million Jews were murdered and the survivors were subsequently awarded a consolation prize at somebody else’s expense. Except Israel was never Europe’s consolation prize.

And here is something that never ceases to amaze me. We all know what happens when Jews invoke three thousand years of history. We are accused of reaching too far into the past, dredging up ancient claims that supposedly have no relevance to the modern world. Other peoples are encouraged to rediscover their ancestral histories, but when Jews do the same, suddenly history comes with an expiration date. Apparently, ours is the one history that doesn’t count. Very well. We needn’t go back three thousand years. Let’s try the nineteenth century.

Jews were living in Jerusalem, Safed, Hebron, and Tiberias long before the emergence of modern political Zionism. During Muhammad Ali’s Egyptian occupation of Palestine between 1831 and 1840, Egyptian soldiers and other migrants settled in parts of the country. The population was hardly static. People moved, settled, established families, and became part of the region’s changing society.

Later, Ottoman authorities imposed restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchases. In 1881, the Ottoman government adopted a policy that permitted Jewish settlement elsewhere in the empire but restricted it in Palestine. And yet Jewish communities endured.

Nineteenth-century demographic research suggests that Jews constituted majorities in Safed and Tiberias during parts of that period, with evidence pointing to a Jewish majority in Jerusalem as well. Not throughout the country, but in cities whose Jewish histories stretched back centuries. So let me understand this correctly. Jewish immigration could be restricted by foreign rulers, Jewish communities could survive those restrictions, and Jews could even form majorities in important cities. Yet somehow, the prevailing story still begins with foreigners arriving to occupy somebody else’s land.

Were the Jews already living there merely rehearsing for the arrival of European Zionists?

And what of the Jews of Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, and other Arab countries? Ancient communities, some predating Islam by centuries, were subjected to discrimination, violence, dispossession, and an exodus that left many of those communities virtually extinct. Apparently, persecution only becomes relevant to the origins of Israel when it happens in Europe.

There is something particularly perverse about the way Jewish minority status is used against us. After centuries of conquest, exile, and demographic change, the fact that Jews were minorities in much of their ancestral homeland is sometimes treated as evidence that they were foreigners.

Imagine applying that reasoning to Native Americans. Imagine suggesting that because European settlement reduced their numbers and displaced their communities, their ancestral connection to the land had somehow expired. Would Obama accept that argument?

And while we are discussing conquest, perhaps we should remember that the Arab conquest of the seventh century brought new rulers to a land where Jewish civilization had already flourished for more than a millennium, and where Jewish communities continued to exist.

Arabic subsequently became dominant, Islam spread, and the population underwent centuries of cultural and religious transformation. Later migrations, including those during Egyptian rule, added to the country’s demographic complexity.

Palestinian Arab ancestry includes longstanding local populations as well as families whose ancestors migrated from neighboring regions. But why is the history of conquest and demographic change so readily acknowledged in every other context, only to disappear when Jews reclaim political independence?

Arab conquest is discussed as history so is Ottoman rule. Changing populations and foreign governments are accepted as part of the country’s development. However, Jewish national restoration becomes colonialism.

There are twenty-two members of the Arab League, including Palestine, and one Jewish-majority sovereign state in the world. The number of states does not settle territorial disputes, but the contrast surely deserves consideration when Jewish sovereignty itself is presented as a historical offense.

And then there is that fashionable word, settler.

It has a specific legal and political application to Israeli communities established in territories captured in 1967. But in some political rhetoric, it is applied to Jews as though their very presence in their ancestral homeland requires an apology. Somehow, the people who endured successive foreign conquests have become the occupiers in the story of their own homeland.

Now, suppose we turn Obama’s explanation around. Suppose we begin with the Jews as the dispossessed people. A people who lost sovereignty in their ancestral homeland, endured conquest, scattered across continents, and survived under Christian and Muslim rulers whose tolerance could disappear almost overnight. Suppose we acknowledge their extraordinary achievement in preserving their identity, language, religious traditions, and attachment to their ancestral homeland. And suppose that, eventually, they decided they had endured enough. Enough expulsions, massacres, discriminatory laws, and dependence upon governments that could withdraw their protection whenever it suited them.

They organized politically, purchased land, established institutions, revived Hebrew as a living national language, and struggled for independence. Modern Zionism did not invent the Jewish relationship with the land; it gave political expression to a national aspiration that had survived centuries without sovereignty.

In 1947, Jewish leaders accepted the United Nations partition proposal while Arab leaders rejected it. War followed, bringing immense consequences, including the flight and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs. Those losses were real, but the war, the rejection of partition, and the centuries of Jewish dispossession preceding it were real too.

If persecution is essential to understanding Palestinian grievances, why is it not equally essential to understanding Jewish self-determination?

And what, exactly, was the alternative? Send the Jews back to Europe, where entire families had been exterminated? Back to Arab countries where ancient Jewish communities were being uprooted? Or perhaps leave them scattered across the world, forever dependent upon the goodwill of societies that had repeatedly demonstrated just how conditional that goodwill could be? We had spent centuries living at the mercy of others. Finally, we had the means to govern ourselves.

Regaining the ability to govern ourselves after centuries at the mercy of others was an extraordinary achievement. Yet the moral argument becomes even more troubling when we examine the violence that preceded and followed Israel’s independence.

Jews were massacred in Hebron in 1929, nearly two decades before the State of Israel existed. In the decades that followed independence, Israeli civilians endured hijackings, suicide bombings, shootings, and rocket attacks.

Then came October 7, 2023.

Hamas-led terrorists crossed into Israel, murdered approximately 1,200 people, and abducted 251 hostages. Families were attacked in their homes. Young people attending a music festival were slaughtered.

What exactly was Israel supposed to do?

I ask that seriously. What would the United States have done if armed terrorists crossed its borders, massacred its citizens, and carried hostages into territory controlled by an organization responsible for repeated attacks?

What would Ireland have done?

Israel’s right to defend its population does not place every military action in Gaza beyond scrutiny. International humanitarian law still applies, and the suffering of Palestinian civilians demands serious attention. But Israel’s obligation to protect its citizens cannot simply be removed from the discussion, nor can decades of terrorism against Israelis be treated as an inconvenient footnote.

Obama condemned October 7, yet in Belfast he also discussed the Hamas attack in terms of how unlikely it was to produce meaningful political change. Surely the fundamental objection to murdering civilians is not that the strategy fails, it’s that murdering civilians is wrong, whether the perpetrators achieve their political objectives or not.

After three years of demonstrations, boycotts, accusations, and antisemitic intimidation, the words of a former American president carry particular significance. They are repeated in classrooms, on university campuses, and across social media, often by people with only a passing familiarity with the history they are discussing.

That is what makes Obama’s account so troubling to me. When a man of his stature presents Jewish sovereignty principally through a narrative of dispossession, while leaving out so much of the Jewish experience, he risks giving renewed authority to the very historical simplifications that have become commonplace in anti-Israel discourse.

He need not support Hamas for that omission to matter. And I am not suggesting that everyone who protests against Israel endorses terrorism. But after October 7, the language used to explain Jewish history deserves more care, not less. And that brings me back to Father Creagh: his congregation was encouraged to see Jews as outsiders whose presence threatened the community. The circumstances, words, and intentions of the two men were different. But the history of antisemitism should remind us how consequential the public portrayal of Jews as outsiders can become.

I have spent years writing about Jewish history, and I confess I am tired of explaining the same things over and over again. Tired of pointing to archaeological discoveries, Ottoman records, and Jewish communities that survived centuries of foreign rule. Tired of explaining that Jews did not suddenly materialize in the Middle East after the Holocaust. Tired of watching a people whose national origins are so thoroughly documented treated as though their history began with the arrival of European refugees. And tired of the peculiar expectation that we must repeatedly justify our place in the one country where our national identity originated.

What I find most extraordinary, however, is that we accomplished something few dispossessed peoples have managed after so many centuries. We survived and we preserved our identity, restored Hebrew as a language of everyday national life, and regained sovereignty in our ancestral homeland. We put an end, for once and for all, to centuries of political dependence upon societies that might tolerate us one day and expel us the next.

In short, we were conquered, we survived, and then we regained our sovereignty. And now, having recovered our independence, we are expected to apologize for having succeeded.

Mr. Obama, perhaps before offering another lesson in morality, you might devote a little more attention to the history that existed before the Holocaust, because the Jews did not become strangers to their own homeland simply because, against extraordinary odds, they survived long enough to reclaim their national life.