Pushing Out or Pulling In?

Melanie Philips, reviewing the BBC's censure of Jim Bowen, makes a rather good point:-

...using the narrowest possible criteria to judge the items in question, the Trust found only relatively minor failings...For example, in his report to mark the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War, ‘How 1967 Defined The Middle East’, the committee concluded about Bowen’s reference to ‘Zionism’s innate instinct to push out the frontier’

that this statement had been unqualified and, as a result it had not been clear and precise and that there had been a breach of the guideline on accuracy in this respect.

...But since the history of Zionism has demonstrably involved not a pushing out of the frontier but a successive pulling back of the frontier – with the British first shrinking the putative Jewish homeland in Palestine by some 75 per cent [that is, giving away Transjordan], and then proposing to cut it in half [in 1947], and with Israel subsequently giving up Sinai and Gaza and having offered to give up most of the West Bank in 1967 and in 2000 -- to criticise this statement for being merely ‘unqualified’ and not ‘clear and precise’ seems, to put it mildly, understated to the point of obduracy.