I recommend reading Matt Duss' response to Charles Krauthammer's column today suggesting that there haven't been any concessions on the Palestinian side when it comes to territory:
“Exactly what bold steps for peace have the Palestinians taken?” Krauthammer asks. Well, for starters, how about relinquishing claims to 78 percent of Palestine? This is precisely what they did in 1993 when, in an exchange of letters between Yassir Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) formally recognized “the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security,” and accepted United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which call upon Israel to withdraw from territories occupied in 1967 and an end to the state of belligerency.
This was, as Hussein Ibish noted recently, “The mother of all compromises.” And it is a compromise that is being reaffirmed by the Palestinians seeking international recognition for a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders.
It's also very much worth remembering that, in exchange for the Palestinians' recognition of Israel and relinquishing Palestinian claims to 78 percent of their homeland that this represented, Israel did not in return recognize “the right of the State of Palestine to exist in peace and security.” It only recognized the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Almost 20 years, no state, and some 200,000 more Israeli settlers later, there is a fairly strong feeling among Palestinians of all stripes that this blatantly asymmetric bargain was a bad one.
This is not the only place in which Krauthammer in misleading in his attempt to mischaracterize Obama's remarks about the 1967 borders as some kind of attack on Israel. In his column he makes two obviously contradictory arguments. First he says that Obama "told Israel it must negotiate the right of return with the Palestinians after having given every inch of territory." Then he writes that Obama was "refusing to reaffirm America’s rejection of the right of return." Well it can be one or the other, and it can't be both. And it was actually neither, since Obama didn't actually mention the issue, but reading speeches that call for " two states for two people" as an endorsement, implicit or otherwise, of Palestinian right of return would require telepathic powers. Part of the point of having two states is to preserve Israel as a Jewish democracy in the face of demographic changes in the region, which is why its disturbing that the current Israeli leadership seems content to prolong an unsustainable status quo.
