Former U.S. President Barack Obama told an audience in Northern Ireland this week that Jews who settled in the Land of Israel “took land off people and they were excessive.” The documented history of Jewish land purchase tells a very different story.
Obama made the remarks on October 13 during a conversation with journalist Susan McKay at the O2 arena in Belfast, hours after Queen’s University Belfast awarded him an honorary doctorate. Discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he began by acknowledging centuries of Jewish suffering. “The fact is that the Jewish people, for millennia, were oppressed, discriminated against, killed,” he said. “They understandably sought a refuge.”
He then turned to the land. “What is also undeniable is that they took land off people and they were excessive. And those people understandably said, ‘This is injustice and I want my land back.’”
Obama also said the strengthening of right-wing forces in Israel and the settler movement had made peace harder to achieve.
The historical record contradicts his central claim. Before 1948, Jews did not seize land in the Land of Israel. They bought it, legally and often at inflated prices, from Arab owners eager to sell.
A Market of Willing Sellers
Between the 1880s and 1948, Jews purchased about two million dunams in the Land of Israel, roughly 500,000 acres. Historian Kenneth Stein of Emory University, the leading scholar of Jewish land acquisition, has documented that most of this land came from wealthy Arab landowners, many of whom lived outside the country. The Sursock family of Beirut alone sold more than 176,000 dunams in the Jezreel Valley.
Prices were steep. Stein cites a 1930 report from the Anglo-Palestine Bank describing Arab middlemen who bought land from peasants for 20 piasters per dunam and resold it to Jewish buyers for about six pounds per dunam.
Supply never ran short. According to Stein, Arab offers to sell land always outnumbered the funds Jews had available to buy it. Some of the most eager sellers were the same Arab political leaders who publicly campaigned against land sales to Jews. Of the 89 members elected to the Arab Executive, the main Arab political body in the Land of Israel, between 1920 and 1928, at least a quarter took part in land sales to Jews, either personally or through their immediate families.
Stein summed up the history plainly: “The lands which became the critical core for Israel were provided by Arab sellers.”
The British Went Looking
The British government, which ruled the Land of Israel at the time, investigated whether Jewish land purchases had left Arabs without land. In 1931, Britain invited any Arab who said he had lost land to Jewish buyers to file a claim, and offered new farmland to those who could prove it. Arabs filed thousands of claims. British authorities found only 664 of them valid.
When Jews Lost Their Land
The years Obama described did see people driven from their homes and land. In several cases, those people were Jews.
Jews had lived in Hebron for centuries. In August 1929, Arab rioters murdered 67 Jews in the city and destroyed their homes and synagogues. The British evacuated the 484 survivors, including 153 children, to Jerusalem. Jews did not return to live in Hebron until after 1967.
In May 1948, Jordan’s army captured the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City and forced out its residents. Over the next 19 years, Jordan destroyed all but one of the Old City’s 35 synagogues and used Jewish tombstones from the Mount of Olives to build roads and latrines. Jordan barred Jews from the Western Wall until Israel reunited Jerusalem in 1967.
An Ancient Pattern
The Jewish practice of paying for land in Israel reaches back to the very beginning of the Jewish story. The Book of Genesis records that Abraham insisted on paying full price, four hundred shekels of silver, for the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron, even after its owner offered it as a gift. Jacob bought a field in Shechem, and King David bought the site of the Temple in Jerusalem.
Today, Hebron, Shechem and the Temple Mount rank among the places where critics most often accuse Jews of taking land that is not theirs.
Obama is right that Jews came to the Land of Israel fleeing persecution. The record shows they did not come as thieves. They came home, and they paid for their land.
https://www.jfeed.com/antisemitism/tmxm3i, https://www.itv.com/news/utv/2026-10-14/obama-receives-honorary-degree-from-queens-university-belfast, https://ismi.emory.edu/documents/Zionist%20Land%20Aquisition.pdf, https://uncpress.org/9780807841785/, https://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/21st-july-1939/21/the-arab-claims, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-hebron-massacre-of-1929, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jordan-s-desecration-of-jerualem-1948-1967, https://steinsaltz-center.org/portal/library/Concise_Guide/Sages/Genesis/title/127/582
