Is Barack Obama Becoming This Generation’s Jimmy Carter on Israel?
Obama's controversial Belfast remarks have reignited a debate over Israel's founding, Jewish history, and whether the former president is following Jimmy Carter's path from American peacemaker to outspoken critic of the Jewish state.
By Uri Pilichowski
Former President Barack Obama has reignited a decades-old debate over Israel's legitimacy, its history, and the responsibility of American leaders to recognize both. Speaking in Belfast on October 13, Obama suggested that the Jewish people's search for refuge after centuries of persecution had come at the expense of another people whose land was taken from them.
The remarks immediately drew a sharp response from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who rejected the suggestion that Israel's establishment was fundamentally an act of dispossession. The Jewish people, Netanyahu argued, were not foreign occupiers but a people returning to their ancestral homeland. The controversy raises a question that extends well beyond the latest Obama–Netanyahu confrontation: Is Barack Obama becoming this generation's Jimmy Carter?
Carter, who brokered the historic peace agreement between Israel and Egypt in 1979, spent much of his post-presidency as one of Israel's most prominent American critics. His increasingly contentious descriptions of Israeli policies eventually alienated even some of his longtime colleagues and supporters.
Obama has not gone nearly as far. Yet his latest comments suggest an increasingly critical interpretation of Israel's founding, one that stands in striking contrast to his own earlier acknowledgment of the Jewish people's ancient national connection to the land.
From Cairo to Jerusalem: Obama's Changing Language on Israel
The controversy surrounding Obama's understanding of Israel's origins is hardly new. In June 2009, during his first year in office, Obama delivered his landmark address at Cairo University, intended to reset relations between the United States and the Muslim world.
Speaking about Israel, Obama emphasized the long history of Jewish persecution in Europe, culminating in the Holocaust. He condemned antisemitism and Holocaust denial, acknowledged the murder of six million Jews, and defended the legitimacy of Jewish aspirations for a homeland.
Yet his framing attracted criticism, particularly among those who believed he had presented Israel's establishment primarily as a consequence of European persecution rather than the modern realization of an ancient national aspiration. The distinction was important. The Holocaust intensified international support for Jewish statehood and underscored the necessity of Jewish sovereignty. But Zionism was already a well-established national movement decades before the Nazis came to power, and Jewish identification with the Land of Israel stretches back thousands of years. For Jews, Israel was not simply a place to escape persecution. It was the historic homeland to which generations had maintained religious, cultural, and national attachments.
Obama's Cairo speech acknowledged America's cultural and historical ties to Israel, but its emphasis on European suffering left critics concerned that the president had offered an incomplete account of Jewish national identity. Four years later, Obama appeared to address precisely that concern. Arriving at Ben Gurion Airport in March 2013, following his reelection, Obama delivered an extraordinarily different description of Israel's founding.
He spoke of stepping onto the historic homeland of the Jewish people, where Jews had lived, cultivated the land, and prayed more than 3,000 years earlier. Israel's founding, he declared, represented a national rebirth after centuries of exile and persecution.
This was a significant distinction. Obama was no longer describing Jewish statehood primarily through the lens of European tragedy. He was acknowledging the restoration of sovereignty in a land that had been central to Jewish identity since antiquity. It was a recognition that Netanyahu and many other Israelis had long insisted was indispensable to any serious understanding of the conflict.
What Obama Said in Belfast—and Why Netanyahu Responded
On October 13, 2026, Obama returned to a substantially different emphasis. During a public conversation in Belfast with journalist Susan McKay, attended by approximately 7,000 people, the former president discussed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after receiving an honorary doctorate from Queen's University Belfast earlier that day.
He began by acknowledging the centuries of discrimination, persecution, and killing endured by the Jewish people, particularly in Europe. Jews, he explained, had understandably sought refuge. Then came the controversial assertion.
According to contemporaneous reporting of his remarks, Obama argued that Jews had taken land from others, including through actions he characterized as excessive, creating an understandable Palestinian demand for restitution. He also criticized Israel's reliance on military and technological superiority, arguing that a government that believes it can secure its future without concessions risks surrendering its moral standing.
There is nothing inherently objectionable about acknowledging Palestinian displacement. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled during the 1947–1949 war, and their suffering remains an essential part of the conflict's history.
The problem is what Obama's account leaves out. Jewish immigration to Ottoman and British Mandatory Palestine did not begin with the Holocaust. Jews had maintained a continuous presence in the land for centuries, while modern Zionist immigration and land purchases began in significant numbers in the late nineteenth century. Jewish communities existed in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias long before the establishment of the modern state.
Nor did Israel emerge simply because European refugees arrived and seized someone else's country. The 1947 United Nations partition proposal envisioned separate Jewish and Arab states in British Mandatory Palestine. Jewish leaders accepted the plan, while Arab leaders rejected it. Fighting between Jewish and Arab communities escalated into civil war, followed by the invasion of neighboring Arab armies after Israel declared independence in May 1948.
The resulting war caused enormous suffering and displacement among Palestinian Arabs. It also secured the independence of a Jewish state whose population included long-established Jewish communities, immigrants who had arrived before the Holocaust, Holocaust survivors, and, subsequently, hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing or leaving countries across the Middle East and North Africa.
These histories do not cancel one another out. But omitting one of them fundamentally changes the story being told. As MidEastJournal has explored in its examination of whether Zionism constitutes colonialism, applying a straightforward European colonial framework to Israel obscures the Jewish people's historical connection to the territory and the very different circumstances surrounding Jewish national revival.
Netanyahu's response to Obama was therefore not simply another dispute over Israeli policy. It was a rejection of the historical premise that appeared to underpin the former president's remarks. For Netanyahu, the central issue was the distinction between foreign conquest and national restoration. Obama had recognized that distinction in 2013. His Belfast remarks placed considerably less emphasis on it.
The Jimmy Carter Parallel: From Peacemaker to Critic
The comparison with Jimmy Carter is particularly revealing because Carter's post-presidential relationship with Israel followed a trajectory few could have predicted from his greatest diplomatic achievement. As president, Carter helped broker the 1978 Camp David Accords, which paved the way for the 1979 Egypt–Israel peace treaty.
The agreement ended the state of war between Israel and the largest Arab country, fundamentally changing the strategic landscape of the Middle East. It remains one of the most important diplomatic achievements in modern American history.
Yet Carter's relationship with Israel became increasingly contentious after he left office. His criticism of Israeli settlement policies, the occupation of Palestinian territories, and American political support for Israel grew sharper over time.
The defining moment came in 2006 with the publication of his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, which compared aspects of Israeli rule in the territories to South Africa's system of racial segregation. The book triggered a fierce controversy. Critics argued that Carter had presented a selective history of the conflict, minimized Palestinian responsibility for failed peace initiatives, and promoted misleading interpretations of Israeli policy.
Supporters defended the book as an overdue challenge to American reluctance to criticize Israel's treatment of Palestinians. The dispute extended into Carter's own institutional circle. In January 2007, fourteen members of an advisory board at the Carter Center resigned, accusing the former president of abandoning his previous role as a mediator in favor of advocacy for one side.
Carter was entitled to criticize Israeli policy, just as Obama is today. The question was whether criticism of specific policies had evolved into a broader interpretation of the conflict that placed disproportionate responsibility on Israel while giving insufficient weight to Jewish historical claims, Israeli security concerns, and repeated Arab and Palestinian opposition to political compromise.
Carter's critics believed that it had. His legacy consequently became unusually divided. He remained the American president who helped deliver Israel's first peace treaty with an Arab neighbor, but also became a central figure in the international campaign criticizing Israel's conduct toward Palestinians.
Obama's Post-Presidency and the Question of Israel's Legitimacy
Obama's record is more complicated than a simple progression from friendship to hostility. As president, he repeatedly reaffirmed Israel's security and supported substantial American military assistance, including the landmark ten-year, $38 billion security assistance memorandum signed in 2016. At the same time, his relationship with Netanyahu was frequently strained by disagreements over Iran, settlements, and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Those disagreements culminated in December 2016, when the Obama administration abstained on United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, allowing a resolution condemning Israeli settlement activity in territories captured in 1967, including East Jerusalem, to pass. The decision provoked an intense diplomatic confrontation with Israel's government during Obama's final weeks in office.
But there is a distinction between opposing settlements, criticizing military policy, or advocating Palestinian statehood and suggesting that the creation of Israel was primarily an injustice committed by European refugees against an indigenous population. The first involves disputes over policies, borders, and the consequences of war. The second involves the historical foundations of Jewish national legitimacy.
Obama has not explicitly denied those foundations. His 2013 statements recognizing the historic Jewish homeland remain part of the record. Nevertheless, the contrast between his 2013 language and his Belfast remarks is difficult to ignore.
In Jerusalem, he described Jewish sovereignty as the culmination of an ancient national aspiration. In Belfast, his explanation emphasized European persecution, Jewish refuge, the taking of land, and Palestinian demands for restitution. Both accounts contain historical truths. But they convey substantially different understandings of how and why Israel came into existence.
The danger of emphasizing only the latter is that Jewish statehood begins to appear not as the restoration of an indigenous people's sovereignty, but primarily as an injustice requiring correction. That framing increasingly characterizes some of the most contentious debates over Israel in Western universities, political movements, and international institutions. And it is precisely why the language of former American presidents matters.
Is Obama Following Carter's Path?
There are important differences between Obama and Carter. Carter spent decades writing, campaigning, and publicly challenging Israeli policies after leaving office. Obama has not established a comparable record of sustained activism on the issue, nor has he embraced Carter's apartheid characterization in the same manner.
It would therefore be premature to conclude that Obama has become another Carter. But the comparison raises a legitimate question about how former American presidents choose to exercise their influence once they are no longer constrained by the responsibilities of office.
Both men presided over important moments in American Middle East diplomacy. Both experienced serious disagreements with Israeli governments. And both, after leaving office, articulated criticisms that prompted questions about whether their understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had become increasingly one-sided.
Obama's Belfast remarks may ultimately prove to be another episode in his long and complicated relationship with Netanyahu rather than the beginning of a Carter-like post-presidential campaign. Yet the historical question remains.
The Jewish people did not arrive in the Middle East as Europeans discovering foreign territory. Their national identity, religious traditions, language, and collective memory had been rooted in the Land of Israel for millennia. The modern State of Israel emerged from a national movement that preceded the Holocaust, amid competing national aspirations, international diplomacy, and a devastating war.
Palestinian suffering is part of that history. It does not erase the rest of it. In 2013, Barack Obama understood the importance of acknowledging the Jewish people's ancient connection to their homeland. In Belfast, he chose to tell a very different part of the story.
Whether he eventually follows Jimmy Carter's path remains to be seen. But the more immediate question is why a former American president who once articulated the historical foundations of Jewish sovereignty so clearly now appears increasingly willing to leave them out. And when that happens, the debate is no longer merely about Israeli policy. It is about the history—and legitimacy—of the Jewish state itself.
Uri Pilichowski is an educator, author, and commentator based in Israel. He writes and speaks frequently on Israeli society, Zionism, Jewish identity, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He lives in a settlement in Judea and Samaria.