Former US president Barack Obama has said Israel has "ceded moral ground" through its reliance on military superiority, and that its government must accept that seven million Palestinians "are not going anywhere".
He made the remarks on Tuesday evening at a sold-out arena event in Belfast, in conversation with the writer and journalist Susan McKay.
Obama said the conflict had to be understood through the histories of both peoples. "The fact is that the Jewish people, for millennia, were oppressed, discriminated against, killed," he said.
"What is also undeniable is that they took land off people and they were excessive," he added. "And those people understandably said, 'This is injustice and I want my land back.'"
He said the greater responsibility for breaking the cycle lay with the stronger side. If Israel's position was that it is now the strongest and most technologically advanced power in the region, he said, "that may work short-term ... but you have ceded moral ground if that is the position you take."
"It is incumbent on them to recognise that 7m Palestinians are not going anywhere," he said of the current Israeli government.
Obama said Palestinians also had to accept that Israel was strong and was not going anywhere either. Of the 7 October 2023 attack led by Hamas, he said "you could not have designed something that was less likely to produce meaningful change."
Asked about the prospects for peace, he said he was "not as hopeful as I want to be in the short term", pointing to "the aftermath of what's happened in Gaza and the nature of political changes that have taken place in Israel".
He cited the strengthening of right-wing forces inside Israel, "the settler movement, the constant changing of the facts on the West Bank", "the continued suffering that's taking place in Gaza" and a hardening of attitudes in Israel since 7 October. "It pains me, and it should pain everyone," he said.
Earlier in his visit Obama received an honorary doctorate from Queen's University Belfast, where he praised Northern Ireland's peace settlement. "The Good Friday Agreement is still a shining example of what can happen when people put aside old wounds and choose peace," he said, adding that "peace and democracy are not inevitable. They have to be chosen, again and again."
Belfast was the first stop of a three-city speaking tour that also takes in Glasgow and Manchester.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the comments in a video posted on Friday, calling them a "regrettable statement".
"The Jewish people are not foreign occupiers in the land of our forefathers," Netanyahu said. "Our history is not a colonial enterprise. Our land is not stolen land. This is our homeland."
He said the obstacle to peace was not Israel but its enemies in the region, and that "a peace built on illusions will crash against the rocks of Middle Eastern reality."