Two of the primary conservative arguments against Obama are that he called for Israel to return to 1967 lines and that he has not publicly stated with enough clarity that Israel will not be expected to negotiate with a government that includes a Hamas that has not recognized Israel’s right to exist.The first point is false, though reasonable people can debate whether Obama was right to go public with a call for talks around 1967 lines with swaps or whether his timing was sound. Pushed on whether there’s anything to the second point, Axelrod flatly denied it.
“The president does not believe that any country can be asked to negotiate with a terrorist organization that is sworn to its destruction and unwilling to abandon that goal or embrace a peaceful settlement of the conflict,” he said. “He could not have been clearer about that.”
His characterization of the first point is a strawman. Conservatives have criticized Obama for pushing the 1967 lines as the starting point for negotiations, but no one I'm aware of has suggested that he's calling on Israel to literally go back to the 1967 lines.
But then the question is, how substantial will the land swaps be? Unless they're pretty huge, then Obama is in fact suggesting that Israel basically go back to the 1967 lines. Maybe someday Obama will get around to explaining what he has in mind.
As for the second point, about which Axelrod says Obama "could not have been any clearer", I would have to go back to the speech and see what he said. I don't recall him being super clear on that point.
It's all BS. All of it. Any Jew who doesn't get that must not care whether Israel is wiped out.
Obama never needed to reference the 1967 lines. It is not like this came out of thin air. This speech was debated and argued in the White House, in the State Department, and even by foreign diplomats including Neetanyahu himself who called many times begging him not to use the phrase days and hours before it was given. He could have used an infinite number of other ways to explain what he meant.
This is a bed made by Obama. Now he has to sleep in it. Sending out surrogates after the fact to retract what he said, after he said he didn’t mean what he said, of which he had to have known the ramifications, won’t help.
The big problem here is that Obama appears to think as if he is the first person to try to solve the conflict. Bush was warned directly and personally by President Clinton to stay out of the snake pit but Obama for some reason jumped right into it.