netanyahu

netanyahu Even as he flew to Washington for talks at the White House on Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continued to signal his anger with President Obama’s statement on Thursday that “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.While it has been a central point of negotiations for years that Israel would swap at least some of the land it seized during the Six-Day War in 1967 for peace, Mr. Netanhayu was apparently disappointed that Mr.

Obama had failed to mention specifically the idea that Israel should be allowed to redraw its borders to include the parts of the West Bank where hundreds of thousands of Israelis have settled since the land was occupied. In a written response to Mr. Obama’s speech on Thursday, Mr. Netanyahu’s office suggested that the Obama administration should be bound by “U.S. commitments made to Israel in 2004,” by President George W. Bush. In a letter to the Israeli leader Ariel Sharon that year, Mr. Bush had called a return to the borders of 1967 “unrealistic,” given “already existing major Israeli populations centers” on the West Bank. Mr. Obama has been less willing to give Israel free reign to treat those settlements as integral parts of its territorOn Friday morning, the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported that is Mr.

Netanyahu “is prepared for a confrontation with President Obama,” because, in the words of one of Mr. Netanyahu’s aides, “Obama apparently does not understand the reality in the Mideast.” An unnamed Israeli official on board the plane taking Mr. Netanyahu to Washington echoed that phrase, telling Reuters that Mr. Obama’s speech suggested that “Washington does not understand the reality,” of “what we face.”

netanyahu