Netanyahu Says Israel Did Not Steal Land. Who Is He Trying To Reassure?

Benjamin Netanyahu has released a video to say that Israel did not steal land. The Israeli prime minister said, “The Jewish people are not foreign occupiers in the land of our forefathers.” He also said, “Our history is not a colonial enterprise.”

The video appeared on X after former President Barack Obama said, during an appearance in Belfast, that Israelis had “taken land off people” and had been “excessive.” Obama also said Palestinians could understandably see that as injustice and want their land back.

Netanyahu did not name Obama in the video. He did not need to. The reply was built for anyone who had heard the accusation.

A history offered as an answer

Netanyahu’s argument is historical. He said Jews have been attached to Judea for thousands of years. He called the land Israel’s homeland.

That is a real historical claim, and it matters to many Jewish people. Jewish religious, cultural, and political life has long been tied to the Land of Israel. The name Judea itself points to an ancient Jewish kingdom in the region.

But history is doing a lot of work in this video. Netanyahu is answering a claim about dispossession with a claim about belonging. Those are related questions. They are not the same question.

A person can have deep ancestral ties to a place and still face hard questions about what happened to people already living there when a modern state was created. That tension is the core of the argument Obama raised. Netanyahu’s video does not resolve it. It reframes it.

Why answer now?

The timing deserves attention. Obama made his remarks on Tuesday in Belfast. Netanyahu posted his response on Friday.

Why did this exchange become a video, rather than a statement from a spokesperson or a line in a speech? A video lets a leader speak directly to an international audience. It can be clipped, shared, and repeated without a reporter in the middle.

That does not tell us why Netanyahu chose this moment. It only tells us the format was chosen with care. A direct-to-camera reply turns a dispute over history into a message about identity: who belongs, who is native, and who is an outsider.

I do not know what political calculations sat behind the decision. But the question is fair: who benefits when a dispute about land becomes a dispute about whether a people are “foreign occupiers”?

What the video settles, and what it does not

Netanyahu’s statement is clear about what he rejects. He rejects the idea that Israel is a colonial project. He rejects the word “stolen.” He says the obstacle to peace is not Israel, but refusal by Israel’s enemies to accept a Jewish state within any borders.

Those are claims, not neutral descriptions. They are also claims many Israelis and supporters of Israel would accept without hesitation.

The unresolved part is harder. People disagree about whether Israel’s actions amount to colonial occupation or to the return of an indigenous people to ancestral land. That disagreement is not a small detail. It shapes how people understand the founding of Israel, the displacement of Palestinians, the occupation of territory captured in 1967, and the prospects for peace.

Netanyahu’s video speaks forcefully to the first view. It speaks much less directly to the second.

The comfort in the framing

There is something reassuring in the way Netanyahu frames the issue. The message is simple: we are not invaders; we are home.

Reassurance can be legitimate. Jewish history includes persecution, expulsion, and genocide. A state that arose after those experiences has a powerful reason to insist that Jewish self-determination is not a foreign imposition.

But reassurance can also become a way to avoid discomfort. If the only question is whether Jews belong in the land, then the question of Palestinian belonging can seem secondary. If the only answer is ancient history, then present-day displacement can seem like an interruption rather than a central fact.

That is the unease in Netanyahu’s reply. It offers certainty where many people experience conflict.

A question worth sitting with

Obama’s language was blunt. He said Israelis took land from people who were expelled. Netanyahu called that characterization regrettable and answered with the language of homeland.

Both men are speaking about the same place. They are not speaking about the same story.

For Netanyahu, the story begins with Jewish attachment to Judea. For Obama, it includes Palestinians who lost land and were expelled. Neither framing is invented. Neither framing, on its own, explains the whole conflict.

The useful question is not whether Netanyahu has a right to defend Israel’s historical narrative. He clearly does. The question is whether a defense of historical belonging can also make room for another people’s historical loss.

If it cannot, then the video may reassure the people it was meant to reassure. It may do little for the people whose claim it was meant to answer.

And that may be the point of a political video: not to settle a history, but to decide which history gets heard first.