The Land Swap Fable

The past ten days saw a dust-up between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regarding peace negotiations with the Palestinians. Time's Joe Klein explains:

Of all the petty annoyances, misdemeanors and felonies of public life, there is none that Barack Obama detests more than to have his words twisted or oversimplified. It is a big part of his frustration with the media; it is a bigger part of his disdain for the talk-show wing of the Republican Party. And so it wasn't hard to imagine smoke jetting from the President's ears as Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, willfully misinterpreted Obama's statement about the need to renegotiate Israel's borders — in Obama's presence, in the Oval Office on May 20. The President had said that a two-state solution, which Netanyahu alleges to support, should be based on the pre-1967 borders, with mutually agreed-upon land swaps that would enable Israel to incorporate the vast majority of its — dare I say — illegal settlements into its territory while giving over equal amounts of Israeli turf to the Palestinians.

This is not a groundbreaking proposition.  ...

But Netanyahu did an astonishing thing: he chose to ignore the part about the land swaps. 

Klein's interpretation isn't groundbreaking either - many Obama apologists have spent the week constructing similar arguments. However, Charles Krauthammer isn't one of them. He has this to say in today's Washington Post:

...last week in his State Department speech, President Obama ... declared that the Arab-Israeli conflict should indeed be resolved along “the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.”

Nothing new here, said Obama three days later. “By definition, it means that the parties themselves — Israelis and Palestinians — will negotiate a border that is different” from 1967.
It means nothing of the sort. “Mutually” means both parties have to agree. And if one side doesn’t? Then, by definition, you’re back to the 1967 lines.

Nor is this merely a theoretical proposition. Three times the Palestinians have been offered exactly that formula, 1967 plus swaps — at Camp David 2000, Taba 2001, and the 2008 Olmert-Abbas negotiations. Every time, the Palestinians said no and walked away.

And that remains their position today: The 1967 lines. Period. Indeed, in September the Palestinians are going to the United Nations to get the world to ratify precisely that — a Palestinian state on the ’67 lines. No swaps.

Note how Obama has undermined Israel’s negotiating position. He is demanding that Israel go into peace talks having already forfeited its claim to the territory won in the ’67 war — its only bargaining chip. 

Klein's assurance that there will be "mutually agreed-upon land swaps" seems hollow. Klein calls the settlements illegal, so why does he think the Palestinians will agree to include some of them in a land swap deal? Any negotiation that starts with the '67 line will end with the '67 line.

Krauthammer's analysis is superior to Klein's.