10/20/2026
Obama’s Dangerous Mideast Words from the Wall Street Journal
His distortions of Jewish history appear carefully considered—which compounds the wound.
By
Elisha Wiesel
Oct. 19, 2026 2:10 pm ET
My father stood in the White House to accept the Congressional Gold Medal from Ronald Reagan, a president he liked and respected, in April 1985. Then he asked Reagan to cancel a planned visit to Bitburg, a German cemetery where members of Hitler’s Waffen-SS were buried. “That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.” My father didn’t shout. He didn’t question Reagan’s heart. He told a friend, in public, that words and actions can cause pain and suffering even if that isn’t the intent.
Sometimes words can do more than cause pain; they can put people in danger. Last week former President Barack Obama was awarded an honorary degree from Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. During a talk that followed, Mr. Obama said of the Jewish people that after millennia of persecution, “they took land off people, and they were excessive. And those people understandably said, ‘This is injustice and I want my land back.’ ”
If we liken speaking styles to writing, President Trump speaks in graffiti: loud, everywhere, often painted over by morning. Mr. Obama speaks in textbook prose. His sentences are quoted in classrooms, cited in essays and preserved in a presidential library. His words are received by millions as considered judgment. That is why they travel far and wound deeply. A careless sentence from a careful man isn’t heard as careless.
Consider the word “excessive.” Was it excessive for Jews to buy land, at fair or often inflated prices, from absentee landlords in Beirut and Damascus who were glad to sell malarial swamps? Was it excessive for the Jews of Hebron, a community that had prayed there for centuries, to be slaughtered by rioters in 1929, nearly 20 years before there was a Jewish state, an occupation or a West Bank settlement to blame? Was it excessive for Jews to accept the United Nations’ 1947 partition plan while facing an impending invasion by five armies in 1948? To offer peace at Camp David in 2000, and again in 2008? To pull every soldier and settler out of Gaza in 2005?
Is it excessive to want to live in peace?
And what does “understandably” demanding one’s land back look like? Understanding Palestinian grievances isn’t the same as excusing Hamas, and Mr. Obama knows the difference. But words have consequences. The partition of India in 1947 uprooted more than 10 million people, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs alike. No American president would tell a crowd that the grandchildren of those who were displaced “understandably” want those homes back, because everyone knows where that leads. We saw where it leads on Oct. 7, 2023. Hamas’s leaders have since vowed to do it again and again until Israel is gone. There can and should be no understanding of those ambitions.
The deeper problem is the story itself. In Mr. Obama’s telling, Jews were oppressed in Europe and then arrived somewhere else and took too much. Jewish history in the land disappears. My father drew a line when he wrote in the New York Times in 2001: “To compromise on territory might seem, under certain conditions, imperative. . . . But to compromise on history is impossible.” That is the line Mr. Obama crossed in Belfast.
The timing of his remarks matters. This week he will rally in Detroit for Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate nominee, who has accused Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid,” called it “bloodthirsty” and a “rogue state,” and, when asked three times on CNN whether Israel has a right to exist, refused to say yes. Mr. Obama is free to campaign for whomever he chooses. But when he, the most trusted voice in the Democratic Party, misrepresents Jewish history and then shares a stage with Mr. El-Sayed, Jewish Americans can be forgiven for hearing one message. Perhaps it is not the one he intends. That is precisely the point about words.
The Obama Presidential Center opened in Chicago this June, and its auditorium bears my father’s name. When the naming was announced, I said that my father respected Mr. Obama greatly but wasn’t afraid to stand apart from him, as he did on the Iran deal. After my father attended the Israeli prime minister’s 2015 speech to Congress opposing that deal, the president never called him again. That makes the Obama Foundation’s decision to honor him all the more meaningful. As I said then, it sends a powerful message that this space will be used to debate the critical issues of the day, “no matter how much our viewpoints may provoke or upset each other and test our friendships.”
But the Elie Wiesel Auditorium must also stand as a warning. My father’s life was a testimony to what words can do. History is replete with speeches, lectures, editorials and textbooks turning neighbors into intruders and murder into justice.
Mr. Obama’s place isn’t with those who call Jewish survival excessive. His place is with the murdered of Hebron and of Oct. 7, and with a people that has been waiting, since 1947, for someone across the table to stop choosing hate.
I hope Mr. Obama reconsiders his words and takes them back. It would be an act worthy of his friendship with my father.
Mr. Wiesel is chairman of the Elie Wiesel Foundation.
