The right wing has been in full on freak out mode since President Obama in a speech on the Middle East yesterday said that for a lasting Middle East peace, “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines.” As CAP’s Matt Duss noted, this isn’t a particularly new substantive position for the U.S. to take but rather perhaps a rhetorical shift.

Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu criticized that plan yesterday, saying he “expects Obama to refrain from demanding that Israel withdraw to ‘indefensible‘ 1967 borders ‘which will leave a large population of Israelis in Judea and Samaria and outside Israel’s borders.’”

Netanyahu met with Obama in the Oval Office and afterword, the two leaders issued statements about what they had discussed. Obama, seeming to recognize the contentious debate on the 1967 borders issue, offered a measured summary of their discussion on the issue. “[W]e discussed the issue of a prospective peace between Israelis and Palestinians,” Obama said and without mentioning the border issue specifically, added, “And I reiterated and we discussed in depth the principles that I laid out yesterday.” However, Netanyahu wasn’t as tactful, outright rejecting, in front of the President, in the Oval Office and in front of video cameras, Obama’s 1967 borders language (watch the full briefing here):

NETANYAHU: I think for there to be peace, the Palestinians will have to accept some basic realities. The first is that while Israel is prepared to make generous compromises for peace, it cannot go back to the 1967 lines — because these lines are indefensible; because they don’t take into account certain changes that have taken place on the ground, demographic changes that have taken place over the last 44 years.

Bibi spent the next several minutes lecturing the President and as ABC’s Jake Tapper noted, “seemed to think he needed to educate President Obama on some issues.”

But maybe Netanyahu is starting to feel the pressure. After all, Israel’s security elite line up more with Obama’s Middle East polices rather than Bibi’s and as Politico’s Ben Smith reported yesterday, “Many U.S. officials are furious…at Benjamin Netanyahu,” quoting one former State Department official:

Netanyahu is being completely disingenuous and irresponsible by trying to suggest that anyone has talked about a return to the exact 1967 borders. That’s not what the President said and he knows very well — because he’s heard this in myriad discussions, that when you’re talking about swaps, it accounts for the settlement blocs, for security.

In his speech on the Middle East peace process yesterday, Obama stated, “The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.” The front page of today’s Washington Post, as reported by Scott Wilson, covered Obama’s statement with this curious paragraph:

The formulation goes beyond principles outlined by President George W. Bush, who stated during his first term that “it is unrealistic to expect” Israel to pull back to the 1967 boundaries, which were based on cease-fire lines established in 1949.

Other newspapers seized on the same angle. The New York Times, which said it was a “subtle, but significant, shift in American policy,” wrote:

While the 1967 borders have long been viewed as the foundation for a peace agreement, Mr. Obama’s formula of land swaps to compensate for disputed territory created a new benchmark for a diplomatic solution.

Both papers’ assertions were presented as matters of fact, not analysis. To wit, neither of their accounts presented analysts to back up the respective claims that Obama’s “formulation goes beyond” the things that Bush said or that Obama “created a new benchmark.” The Post’s editorial board, however, did note that these assessments are a matter of analysis.

In contrast, its cross-town rival, the Washington Times, while focusing its story on Netanyahu and other Israeli’s objections to the remark, took a more objective posture, implicitly acknowledging that taking a broad view of one sentence of Obama’s speech required expert interpretation. Times journalist Eli Lake offered up not only an analyst to back up the notion that a shift had taken place, but also presented a countering perspective from another respected analyst:

Edward Djerejian, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Syria, said he thought the speech made concessions to Israelis and Palestinians.

“I think people are taking what the president said on the ‘67 borders totally out of context,” he said…

Mr. Djerejian said the idea that the 1967 borders would be the basis for negotiations has been a “constant since the 1991 Madrid talks.”

Aaron David Miller, an adviser to six secretaries of state on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, disagreed.

“This is the first time an American president in a high-profile, much-anticipated speech put out the concept of 1967 borders and mutually agreeable swaps without softening it for the Israelis with any kind of context,” said Mr. Miller…

Miller’s analysis, Netanyahu’s objections, and Lake’s piece all centered on a letter sent by Bush to then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon thanking the Israeli leader for his plan to unilaterally disengage from Gaza. Bush wrote of his understanding that Israeli settlements in the West Bank had created “new realities on the ground” and that it would be “unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.”

This basis for attacking Obama’s comments yesterday does not hold water. The comment on the “1967 lines” in Obama’s Middle East address also contained the caveat that there would be mutually agreed swaps” of territory. Few of the right-wing critics who blasted Obama acknowledged this caveat. Read more