1967 Borders

(Sunday 1am: update below)

There has been a lot of discussion about Obama’s endorsement of Israel and Palestine’s returning to “1967 lines with mutually agreed [land] swaps.”

Conservatives (e.g. Charles Krauthammer) interpreted Obama’s statement as basically just an endorsement of returning to 1967 borders, and then liberals (e.g. Will Saletan) criticized the conservatives for ignoring the “mutually agreed swaps” that Obama called for. Liberals are right and conservatives wrong on the narrow point they are debating — of course you can’t simply ignore the clause “mutually agreed land swaps.”

But both conservatives and liberals missed the far more important point: Obama’s endorsement of “pre-1967 borders, with mutually agreed swaps” is exactly as useful as a civil judge’s declaration that “the defendent must return the stolen sofa to the plaintiff, but there also need to be further mutually agreed furniture exchanges between the defendent and plaintiff (which may or may not include swapping the stolen sofa back to the defendent).” In other words, it is not useful. The judge would have just as well declared “the plaintiff and defendent need to arrive at a mutually agreeable resolution to their furniture dispute,” as Obama could have simply explained “Israel and Palestine need agree on borders.” Any borders separating Israel from Palestine can trivially be constructed as equal to “pre-1967 borders” plus “swaps.” Why bother involving Obama in the first place?

Obama is a former community organizer. I wonder whether he often found it useful, when mediating a 2-party dispute, to put forth a resolution and then declare that that resolution should be further modified in an unspecified way (to be determined through “further negotiations” by the parties themselves). I certainly would not have appreciated this approach if I were a member of his community.

Update: I also should have mentioned that we should be too unhappy with Netanyahu and the conservatives for basically ignoring the “with mutually agreed swaps” clause. The reason is that it is that clause which renders Obama’s statement useless. Netanyahu and the conservatives misunderstood Obama as having said something substantive, perhaps due to a human tendency to err on the side of interpreting a statement as having substance. Obama then basically had to go to AIPAC and emphasize the “with mutually agreed swaps” clause, i.e. emphasize that in fact he takes no position whatsoever on the borders. If he’d simply said “I take no position on the borders,” Netanyahu surely would have understood the first time.

Also I should mention that this argument probably applies just as much to Bush and some other presidents as well, as I have read that Obama’s statement is consistent with that of previous administrations.