Netanyahu fires back at Obama after he accuses Israel of stealing land…

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected comments by former US President Barack Obama about the founding of Israel, the New York Post reports.

Obama spoke Tuesday in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in a conversation with Irish journalist Susan McKay at the O2 Arena before about 7,000 people, at a paid event. He had received an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University Belfast earlier that day. Obama said European persecution drove Jews to seek refuge in the Middle East, but that Palestinians were expelled from their land and understandably saw it as an injustice.

He also said Israel has ceded “moral ground” through its conduct in the Gaza war, which began after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack that killed more than 1,200 people.

In a video posted on X on Friday, Netanyahu said: “The Jewish people are not foreign occupiers in the land of our forefathers.” He called the land the Jewish homeland, known as Judea, and said Jews have been attached to it for thousands of years.

Netanyahu said the obstacle to peace is not Israel but its enemies’ refusal to recognize the Jewish people’s right to a state, and that those enemies are also America’s.

The two leaders have clashed before, most notably in May 2011 over Obama’s call for negotiations based on pre-1967 borders.