Bibi Netanyahu and Fox News have now made it crystal clear — over and over and over — that Israel will never return to its 1967 borders. The dissimulation here is really pretty staggering. They’re just hellbent on giving everyone listening to them the impression that this is what President Obama has proposed.
He hasn’t, of course. No American president ever has. Full stop. It’s really pretty loathsome listening to these guys doing their best to pretend otherwise.
Still, maybe it’s all for the best. If Obama’s utterance of the word 1967 is really so revolutionary, maybe it ought to be out on the table. Likewise, I’m fine with Netanyahu saying categorically that the right of return is a dead letter. It is, after all, and there’s not a lot of point in pretending otherwise.
Still, I noticed during the press conference that we aren’t entirely free of euphemisms yet. Netanyahu stammered a bit when he talked about Israel’s borders and then very carefully referred to “demographic changes on the ground over the past 44 years” that made its 1967 borders unacceptable. Needless to say, there’s nothing demographic at all about those changes. Israel won a war started by the other side, it occupied some of their territory, and then it decided to take some of that territory forever. We can argue endlessly about whether any of this was justified, but “demographic changes” is definitely not the usual way of referring to territory seized in a war.
