The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler, my colleague Josh Gerstein and I, among others, have been arguing on email and Twitter this morning over how big a departure (just in case you're not tired of this subject yet) Obama's language yesterday was from Bush's in 2005.
The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.
Bush:
Any final status agreement must be reached between the two parties, and changes to the 1949 Armistice Lines must be mutually agreed to.
Both 1967 and 1949, in this context, refer to the same lines, and you have to be fairly deep in the weeds to catch the difference. But the conflict lives in those deep weeds, and Glenn suggested we check in with Elliott Abrams, who was Bush's key advisor on the issue at the time. I emailed him, and he responds:
I think it is a big change, for reasons explained by [Robert] Satloff ...and by [Alan] Dershowitz ...:
If you wish to say "but Bush said X in 2005," my answer is that he had already said what he said in 2004, in writing, and repeated over and over, and gotten both houses of Congress to endorse. So there was a context of no return to '49 lines. Moreover he kept saying "'49 lines," which emphasizes they are just armistice lines, not a border, and have no legal weight. The context for Obama is a very troubled relationship with Israel, no coordination, and saying this -- as Satloff points out -- right after the PA decides to unite with Hamas.
He's making two points here. One is about detailed parsing; the other about obvious context. I'm not sure how easy they are to separate.
Source: http://feeds.politico.com/click.phdo?i=a82cb7bb3c1ce8404d15bda65d8a80d9
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