Obama provides a sobering starting point for future talks

President Barack Obama’s state- ment last week suggesting that Israel should somehow be bound to its pre-1967 borders had a dramatic sound to it. But as a practical matter, that is no more likely to happen than the United States renegotiating an end to the Mexican-American War and ceding California, Nevada, Utah, Texas and most of Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado to Mexico.

Israel has occupied the disputed territories for two-thirds of Israel’s modern existence. Some of the disputed land has enormous strategic value, including the Golan Heights adjacent to Syria. Recent events in Syria and Lebanon have, if anything, made that high ground even more important.

And Israel can rightly point to its experience after giving up control of Gaza, adjacent to Egypt, which brought not peace, but more conflict along the Israeli-Gaza border.

The initial reaction to Obama’s statement last week was that the president was unilaterally telling Israel that it had to retreat to the 1967 boundaries. That view is reflected in today’s political cartoon. The president has since taken pains to clarify that the United States remains Israel’s strongest ally, though any clarification has not seemed to mollify Israeli hawks, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Speaking to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on Sunday, Obama said those border lines must be subject to negotiated agreemeent. Placing everything on the table as a starting point for negotiations is not a unilateral endorsement of a return to a Middle East map of 1967.

That’s of no consolation to those who envision a Greater Israel, a nation that would consume the West Bank territories and more.

Demographic dilemma

Such a nation would not be viable — practically or politically. As a simple matter of demographics, it is impossible to have a democratic Jewish state in which a large plurality or even a majority is not Jewish. By the same token, it is politically impractical for a Jewish leader to abandon all of the settlements that have been built during 44 years of occupation. Some Israeli settlements have been abandoned, — notably in Gaza, where Israeli troops forcibly removed Jewish settlers. But some West Bank “settlements” are more cities than outposts and all sides in the negotiations know, even if they are not willing to acknowledge it, that some of those settlements are as close to permanent as anything becomes.

Obama’s statement, as jarring as it may have sounded, is arguably — as his administration claimed — consistent with past administrations that have grappled with the U.S. role in negotiating a peaceful settlement to more than 60 years of hostilities.

That what Obama said is a dramatic counterpoint to the continuing assertion by Netanyahu that Israel has a right to continue to build new settlements and move thousands of additional families into the disputed territories should not be jarring. It should be accepted as a declaration of U.S. policy that peace talks need a starting point. And, frankly, Obama’s starting point is more morally and politically defensible than Netanyahu’s.