Netanyahu Responds Icily to Obama Remarks
By ETHAN BRONNER
NYT
JERUSALEM — President Obama’s endorsement on Thursday of using the 1967 boundaries as the baseline for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute — the first by an American president — prompted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to push back testily and the Palestinian leadership to call an urgent meeting.
Mr. Netanyahu said in a pointed statement just before boarding a plane to Washington that while he appreciated Mr. Obama’s commitment to peace, he “expects to hear a reaffirmation from President Obama of American commitments made to Israel in 2004 which were overwhelmingly supported by both Houses of Congress.”
Those commitments came in a letter from President George W. Bush which stated, among other things that “it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949,” another way of describing the 1967 boundaries.
Mr. Netanyahu, who is to meet with Mr. Obama at the White House on Friday in what seems likely now to be a tense encounter, added that the commitments “relate to Israel not having to withdraw to the 1967 lines, which are both indefensible and which would leave major Israeli population centers in Judea and Samaria beyond those lines,” a reference to large Israeli settlement blocs in the West Bank.
(More here.)
NYT
JERUSALEM — President Obama’s endorsement on Thursday of using the 1967 boundaries as the baseline for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute — the first by an American president — prompted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to push back testily and the Palestinian leadership to call an urgent meeting.
Mr. Netanyahu said in a pointed statement just before boarding a plane to Washington that while he appreciated Mr. Obama’s commitment to peace, he “expects to hear a reaffirmation from President Obama of American commitments made to Israel in 2004 which were overwhelmingly supported by both Houses of Congress.”
Those commitments came in a letter from President George W. Bush which stated, among other things that “it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949,” another way of describing the 1967 boundaries.
Mr. Netanyahu, who is to meet with Mr. Obama at the White House on Friday in what seems likely now to be a tense encounter, added that the commitments “relate to Israel not having to withdraw to the 1967 lines, which are both indefensible and which would leave major Israeli population centers in Judea and Samaria beyond those lines,” a reference to large Israeli settlement blocs in the West Bank.
(More here.)
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