Obama is wrong to call Jews ‘excessive.’ Elisha Wiesel sets him straight

By Richard D. Land, Christian Post Executive Editor Friday, October 23, 2026

It isn’t often that a newspaper column — even one in The Wall Street Journal — prompts me to write a column in response. This one, however, is by Elisha Wiesel, son of the famed Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel. The elder Wiesel received the Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom and was a founding member of the Human Rights Foundation and the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

Elisha Wiesel has carried on his father’s work through the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. In his op-ed “Obama’s Dangerous Mideast Words,” published this week in The Wall Street Journal, Wiesel takes great exception to remarks former President Barack Obama made after accepting an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland.

During a talk that followed, Wiesel writes, 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.”’”

Wiesel is right to be both deeply concerned and justifiably upset by the former president’s remarks. Obama has a reputation as a serious voice on international relations. Coming from him, on the same day he received an academic honor, such an outrageously erroneous and inflammatory statement was, as Wiesel noted, extremely dangerous.

Wiesel then explores just how dangerous and erroneous Obama’s characterization of the Jewish homeland is, beginning with 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?”

Wiesel recounts the slaughter of Jewish settlers in the years before 1948 and the invasion of the new Jewish state — which the United Nations had voted to create — by the modern armies of five Arab nations the moment Israel declared independence. He then cites Israel’s offers of “peace at Camp David in 2000, and again in 2008,” as well as its decision to pull “every soldier and settler out of Gaza in 2005.”

Going deeper into Obama’s misrepresentation of the Israeli-Arab conflict, Wiesel challenges Obama’s narrative that the Jews were “oppressed in Europe and then arrive somewhere else and took too much.” But the Holy Land belonged to the Jews for centuries before the Arabs arrived. Read the Bible. God gave it to them in perpetuity.

The “West Bank” is a modern geographic invention for what the Bible calls Judea and Samaria — the Holy Land. Wiesel quotes his father’s 2001 words on the territorial question: “To compromise on territory might seem, under certain conditions, imperative. [...] But to compromise on history is impossible.”

Wiesel also notes that the auditorium at the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, which opened this past June, is named for his father.

Wiesel closes with a passionate and moving challenge, calling on Obama to change his mind. He writes: “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 would extend Wiesel’s call to all Americans and to people of common decency everywhere.

Too often today, anti-Zionism is morphing into antisemitism or serving as camouflage for it.

As a Christian, I call on my fellow Christians to make common cause with the Jews and to make it manifestly clear that we, as followers of Jesus, stand with them. If you wish God’s chosen people ill, you will have to come through us to get to them. We will stand with those whom Corrie ten Boom’s father called the “apple of God’s eye.”

Shalom!