Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly agreed to peace talks based on 1967 borders on the condition that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state and solve the Palestinian refugee issue outside of Israel's borders.
Then we had this (which may have come from sources at Haaretz who are always using the newspaper as a weapon of subversion to undercut Netanyahu:-
Israel 'ready to negotiate borders with Palestinians'
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has bowed to US pressure by agreeing for the first time that a Palestinian state should roughly follow the contours of the 1967 ceasefire lines separating the West Bank from Israel.
which followed an American pique which the paper tried to 'fix':-
A senior U.S. State Department official told Haaretz Friday that U.S. President Barack Obama is disappointed with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's reaction to his Middle East policy, faulting Netanyahu for focusing on the issue of 1967 borders instead of looking at his policy as a whole and especially the alternative he proposed to the unilateral declaration of the Palestinian state at the United Nations.
The JPost got it right:-
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said on Monday that Israel and the US were working on a document saying the parameters for returning to negotiations with the Palestinians would be based on the speech US President Barack Obama gave at AIPAC in May, and spelling out in greater detail what Obama meant by saying that an agreement should be based on a return to the 1967 lines, with mutual agreed swaps.
Netanyahu told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that “we are interacting with the US to put together a document [for an agreement with the Palestinians] using language from Obama’s second speech [the AIPAC speech].”
This speech explained in greater detail what Obama had said three days earlier at the State Department. That speech raised Netanyahu’s ire because it called for an agreement based on the pre-1967 lines, with mutually agreed swaps.
Voice of America went both ways:
Israeli officials say Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has agreed to negotiate the borders of a future Palestinian state using the 1967 cease-fire line that delineates the West Bank as a starting point for talks.
Sources in the prime minister's office revealed the dramatic policy shift to Israeli media outlets late Monday...Officials said Mr. Netanyahu made clear that Israel will not return to the borders it had before the 1967 Six-Day War. They said demographic changes that have taken place since then - the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank - must be taken into account.
The officials also said that in exchange for the concession, Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish state and retract a unilateral application for statehood likely to be submitted to the United Nations next month.
And here is the Israel Hayom version
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Monday that he had reached a written agreement with the Obama administration according to which Israel would not be required to return to the 1967 borders in any future peace deal with the Palestinians. In addition, any future peace talks would take into account established "realities on the ground" - a term generally used in reference to Israel's large settlement blocs of Ariel, Maale Adumim and Gush Etzion.
Netanyahu's statements would mean an effective American ratification of a letter sent in 2004 by former U.S. President George W. Bush to former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon which guaranteed that the settlement blocs would remain a part of Israel in any future peace agreement with the Palestinians. The current administration, under President Barack Obama, has not publicly endorsed Bush's letter to Sharon. In 2009, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said there was no acknowledgment of any such agreement in the official negotiating record between Israel and the Bush administration. "There is no memorialization of any informal and oral agreements. If they did occur, which of course people say they did, they did not become part of the official position of the U.S. government," Clinton said.
...Prime Minister's Office spokesman Gidi Shmerling clarified on Monday night that the understanding with the U.S. does not include an Israeli agreement to return to the 1967 borders. Rather, the U.S. has acknowledged that any future talks would take into consideration the changes on the ground as well as Israel's security concerns.
The anti-concessionist crowd was stirred by this Arutz 7 report:-
The Netanyahu government has confirmed it will accept renewed talks with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, based on the 1949-1967 borders, if the PA scraps its initiative to ask the United Nations for recognition...In an seeming concession to President Obama, the Prime Minister now is willing to meet with Abbas on condition that the Palestinian Authority withdraw his plan to go the United Nations.
which was a bit irresponsible or at the least, unprofessional.
(k/t=ChallahHuAkbar)
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