Obama - real or fake on Palestinian borders?

Short answer? He's still more fake than real.

The New York Times does not fluff President Barack Obama's support for Palestine to have 1967 borders as much as the Christian Science Monitor implies, but it fluffs it enough.

After admitting Obama said 1967 is just a "starting point," the old gray lady claims:

The shift is significant because it means America now explicitly backs the view that new Israeli settlement construction outside those borders would have to be reversed — or compensated for by exchanges of territory — in talks over the formation of a new Palestinian state.

Wrong. It doesn't mean that at all. Since 1967 borders are just a "starting point," any denoument doesn't imply any compensation at all.

Rather, Obama could mean that an eventual borders deal will result in something halfway between 1967 and current Israeli annexations.

Indeed, he himself says this later on, though the Times buries the quote near the end of the story:

“The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines, with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states,” he said. “The Palestinian must have the right to govern themselves and reach their potential in sovereign and contiguous state.”

Note that? Mutually agreed swaps. That's your code language.

And, speaking of language, did you hear the phrase "right of return" anywhere? Of course not.

Anyway, to stop future Israeli settlements, until Obama does something serious, like his predecessor George H.W. Bush impounding foreign aid to Israel until it stopped building, we'll really know he's still more fake than real.

Beyond that, the Monitor is right to note that Obama was engaged in semantics more than anything else:

The first paragraph of the story, filed from Washington, is quite dramatic. Obama, "seeking to harness the seismic political change unfolding in the Arab world... publicly called for the borders prevailing before the 1967 Israeli-Arab war to be the baseline for a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the first time an American president has explicitly taken that position."

The only problem is, it's not much of a shift at all. The key word in that opening paragraph is the world "explicitly." What it means in this context, is that he said something that multiple presidents have said before him, but with slightly weaker language. What did he say? "The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states."

That an eventual settlement would be based around borders from before the 1967 war, with land "swaps" of some kind to reflect the growth of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, has been a central assumption behind the peace process kicked off under President Bill Clinton in the early 1990s and pursued with subtle variations by presidents George W. Bush and Obama after him.

So, the Beltway media establishment uncritically fluffs Obama on the Middle East, while the Monitor picks up on the key of "swaps."

The Monitor goes on to provide more evidence Obama's still more fake than real:

He also sought to shoot down Palestinian efforts to win recognition for an independent state at the United Nations, something the Palestinian Authority has been gearing up for in September.

"For the Palestinians, efforts to delegitimize Israel will end in failure. Symbolic actions to isolate Israel at the United Nations in September won’t create an independent state," Obama said, in a speech in which he repeatedly praised nonviolent protest in other parts of the region in pursuit of national "self-determination."

Did Mahmoud Abbas say the General Assembly must boot Israel as the price of Palestinian admission, like Beijing did with Taiwan?

Nope, nope, nope.

And, UN membership is "symbolic"? Well, if you're the U.S. and picking and choosing UN actions to accept or not, I guess the answer is yes.

True, Bibi Netanyahu expressed outrage over the speech, but he'd express outrage if a non-Zionist told him his watch was off by 5 minutes.