There are continuing ruffles and trifles about whether President Obama said anything at all different about the borders of a Palestinian state. Much of it is either meta-talmudic picky (Glenn Kessler in the Washington Post) or poisonously disingenuous (the ever-bilious Charles Krauthammer). Kessler’s gripe is that Obama is the first President to use the “1967 borders with agreed-upon swaps” formulation. Perhaps. But that has been the de facto position of the US government since Nixon. All it means is that there will be a Palestinian state on the West Bank–even Netanyahu says he supports this, though an argument can be made that he really doesn’t–but that the borders will be redrawn to include the vast majority, somewhere between 80% and 90%, of the (illegal) Israeli settlements in the Jewish state. The Palestinians will receive a few patches of desert, of equal size to the territory yielded, in return. This is not a bad deal for Israel. Again, Obama broke no meaningful new ground here.
As for Krauthammer...
