Obama Got a Doctorate in Belfast and Failed the Local History Lesson

On Oct. 13, Barack Obama collected an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University Belfast. That evening, at the city’s O2 arena, he gave his audience a short “history” of Israel. Jews, he said, had been persecuted for millennia and understandably sought refuge. “What is also undeniable is that they took land off people and they were excessive.” Israel, as the stronger party, had to make concessions or risk having “ceded moral ground.”

Obama has been corrected on this story before, by the man who wrote it for him. In Cairo in 2009, he rooted the case for a Jewish homeland in “a tragic history” and went straight to the Holocaust. In 2021, his speechwriter Ben Rhodes characterized that framing as a mistake on his part, conceding that Israel did not begin with the Holocaust. Arriving at Ben Gurion Airport in 2013, Obama acknowledged Jews lived in the land “more than 3,000 years ago,” then jumped to “centuries of exile.” Even that version erased the Jews who never left. In Cairo, Israel was Europe’s debt. In Belfast, it became Europe’s refugees taking land from Arabs who had never harmed them.

The record says otherwise. Jews are indigenous to this land and never abandoned it. Jewish communities endured in Jerusalem, Hebron, Tzfat and Tiberias through every conquest. Jerusalem had a Jewish majority before the first Zionist Congress in 1897. My own family were Jerusalemites for eight generations. Nor was antisemitic persecution exclusively European. Under Arab and Muslim rule, Jews lived for centuries as dhimmis, taxed as Jews, humiliated by law and repeatedly massacred. In 1834, Arab rioters sacked Tzfat’s Jewish quarter. In 1929, they massacred 67 Jews in Hebron. After 1948, some 850,000 Jews were driven from Arab countries.

Before 1948, Jews acquired land in Ottoman and British Mandatory Palestine overwhelmingly through purchases, often at inflated prices from absentee owners in Beirut and Damascus. War redrew the map. Obama never asks who chose it.

In 1937, Britain’s Peel Commission proposed the first partition. The Jewish leadership agreed in principle and to negotiations. The Arab leadership rejected it outright, as it has every version since.

The most powerful Palestinian Arab leader, Jerusalem’s Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, met Hitler in Berlin in November 1941, seeking Nazi support for eliminating the Jewish national home. On the Nazi payroll, he broadcast from Berlin, urging Arabs to kill Jews wherever they found them. He helped recruit Bosnian Muslims into the Waffen-SS and lobbied Axis governments to prevent Jewish children from escaping to British Palestine, sending them instead to Poland and its death camps.

In Iraq, a pro-Nazi coup in 1941 preceded the Farhud, a two-day Baghdad pogrom that murdered about 180 Jews, seven years before there was an Israel to blame. If Obama wants to discuss “excess,” there it is.

The pattern continued. In 1947, Jewish leaders accepted the U.N. partition plan; Arab dictators rejected it. In 1948, five Arab armies invaded to destroy the newborn state. In 1967, after another failed war of annihilation, the Arab League gathered at Khartoum and declared three no’s: no peace, no recognition, no negotiation. In 2000, 2001 and 2008, Israeli prime ministers offered a Palestinian state. Each offer was refused. In 2005, Israel withdrew from every inch of Gaza. Hamas seized it within two years.

When Anwar Sadat came to Jerusalem, Israel relinquished the entire Sinai Peninsula and signed a peace treaty in 1979 that has held nearly half a century. When the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco chose normalization in 2020, Israel signed the Abraham Accords within months.

Whenever an Arab party stopped making war, Israel made peace. The obstacle has never been Israel’s strength, but Palestinian Arab leaders’ refusal, unbroken since 1937, to accept a Jewish state within any borders.

Belfast’s Good Friday Agreement of April 10, 1998 followed years of negotiations and ceasefires. It committed the parties to peaceful politics and the disarmament of paramilitary organizations. But the IRA kept its weapons, and disputes over decommissioning repeatedly obstructed implementation. Even painful concessions, including early prisoner releases, could not resolve that impasse.

On July 28, 2005, the IRA formally ended its armed campaign. On Sept. 26, independent monitors confirmed its arsenal had been put beyond use. The IRA was responsible for nearly half the roughly 3,600 deaths during Northern Ireland’s three-decade Troubles. The agreement had been reached seven years earlier, but verified disarmament was a crucial step toward the durable power-sharing settlement that followed.

Peace in Belfast, like peace in Sinai, required more than concessions. It required those who had pursued political goals through violence to abandon the gun. Negotiations could begin before disarmament, but lasting peace depended on ending the armed campaign.

Hamas refuses to disarm. Senior official Ghazi Hamad vowed to repeat Oct. 7 “again and again,” until Israel is wiped out. And the Irish analogy actually runs the other way. Jews are to this land what the Irish are to Ireland. Arab rule, like British rule, arrived by conquest. The IRA wanted the conquerors out. Hamas wants Jews wiped from Judea.

Obama did “criticize” Oct. 7: “You could not have designed something that was less likely to produce meaningful change.” What a morally defective description of the mass murder of some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, mass rapes and the kidnapping of over 250 hostages. Oct. 7 was no failed peace strategy. It was entirely consistent with Hamas’ goal, shared by Haj Amin al-Husseini, of mass-murdering Jews. Yet Obama placed the onus on Israel, precisely the opposite of the lesson Belfast offers.

Obama warned Israel against ceding moral ground. Arab leaders forfeited theirs in 1937, at Hitler’s table in 1941, in Baghdad’s streets that same year, and through successive wars and rejections. Israel has answered every genuine offer of peace with peace. Northern Ireland learned at a terrible price that political agreements alone cannot secure lasting peace while armed terrorist groups remain committed to violence.

Queen’s gave Obama the degree. Belfast offered him the lesson. He failed it.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.