Putting Obama's Mideast Statement in Context

Last Thursday, President Barack Obama based on the border plans from before the 1967 Six-Day War.

“The United States believes that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan and Egypt, and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine,” Obama said.

While many pundits and experts from many different ideologies have examined the consequences of this statement and policy in terms of global diplomacy, I feel it is also important to analyze the reaction to this speech by Americans of my generation.

I first realized that the speech was a bigger issue among my schoolmates than expected when it was brought up to me in regular conversation the very next day, for a second time. I was, however, somewhat surprised by what many of my classmates believed about the announcement. Accusations that our President was “betraying Israel” and “letting the terrorists win” were frequently levied, with the predicted overall result that he had “lost the vote of the Jewish people.”

Overall trends from this viewpoint included the belief that the announced policy was radically new. While this was the clear majority, some found the announced policy to be a new commitment to peace in a region long neglected. While not many people went into a major extreme, and almost all seemed more than willing to listen to facts, I felt that there was a problem regarding how they formed these opinions; they seemed to consider the news without prior context.

The reaction to this news as a new and radical redefinition of established policy is highly overblown, and it somewhat worries me that this appears to be the accepted fact by many.

President George W. Bush voiced his support for pre-1967 border plans in 2005, saying in a speech that “Any final status agreement must be reached between the two parties, and changes to the 1949 Armistice lines must be mutually agreed to." Under the administration of President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright acted as a witness for a memorandum in September of 1999, signed by Ehud Barak, then the Prime Minister and now the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense of Israel, containing the agreement that “The two Sides reaffirm their understanding that the negotiations on the Permanent Status will lead to the implementation of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338."

Security Council Resolution 242, passed in 1967 months after the Six-Day War, stated that “The Security Council… Affirms that the fulfillment of Charter principles requires the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East which should include the application of both the following principles: Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict;…” 

Since the days of the Clinton Administration, it was accepted by even Israel that the negotiations regarding a Palestinian state would involve the removal of Israeli forces in favor of pre-1967 borderlines. Viewed through this lens, it not only becomes clear that Obama’s statement was not a radical change of policy, but rather a restatement of precedent, and therefore a vow to continue the same actions regarding these negotiations.

I appreciate the urge to learn more about current events in our world, and discuss these events, but I would appreciate if my generation took the time to learn the background knowledge with which to view these events from a better angle.