Petra Marquardt-Bigman: Obama, Netanyahu and the 1967 border

Petra Marquardt-Bigman is a German/Israeli citizen with a PhD in contemporary history.

The furious reaction that ensued last week after President Barack Obama first articulated his vision of a future Israeli-Palestinian border "based on the 1967 lines" seemed like a case of much ado about nothing when Obama repeated and explained the very same idea a few days later at the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), where an audience of some 10,000 delegates reacted in a more friendly way.

However, Obama's claim that the controversy was "not based in substance" and that he had merely stated openly "what has long been acknowledged privately" should be taken with a pinch of salt – after all, if the president of the United States decides to state publicly what was previously acknowledged only in private, he is actually announcing a shift in policy.

Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, seems resolved to emphasise at every opportunity that a return to the "1967 lines" is incompatible with Israel's right to secure and defensible borders, and he reiterated this in his own address to the Aipac conference. At the same time, Netanyahu is apparently eager to counter speculations that there are once again serious tensions between him and the US president, not least because such tensions would only strengthen Netanyahu's critics at home, since Israelis generally don't like a prime minister who can't get along with the Jewish state's most important ally...