It was not pretty. The body language between President Barack Obama, leader of the closest and most enduring ally of the Jewish State and Israel Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu at the White House last week, was cold enough to roll back centuries of global warming. On the eve of Netanyahu’s arrival in Washington to address the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby), Obama delivered a “major policy speech” at the State Department, purportedly in response to the “Arab Spring” uprisings that have convulsed the Middle East and North Africa for several months.

In the course of his remarks, the president dropped the diplomatic bombshell that culminated in the frosty photo-op with Netanyahu: Obama called for resumed peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians based on the assumption that Israel would withdraw to its pre-Six-Day War borders of 1967, adding, importantly, “with agreed upon land swaps.”

Even with the important qualification that “agreed upon land swaps” would be part of the president’s formulation, the explicit reference to the “1967 borders” set off alarm bells not only in Jerusalem but among many supporters of a strong U.S.-Israel relationship – especially those thousands of delegates in Washington attending the AIPAC Policy Conference. There has been much demagoguery from all sides of the political spectrum among politicians, pundits and advocates, which have only made the situation worse. Examples:

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• The assertion by GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney that Obama had “thrown Israel under the bus.” If indeed Obama had not added the qualification “with agreed upon land swaps” and had not walked back from some of his State Department speech assertion in his own address to AIPAC on Sunday, it might indeed have seemed that the president had pulled the pins out from under Israel. To be sure, the president’s speech was extremely ill-timed, coming on the eve of an official White House visit by Netanyahu. But care must be taken to quote the dueling speeches fully and accurately, rather than using out of context sentences as the basis for blatant political attacks.

• The assertion by Jeffrey Goldberg, a respected writer on the Middle East for The Atlantic magazine, that Obama’s reference to the 1967 borders was not a “big deal.” Goldberg, himself a former soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, pointed out that the reference to the 1967 borders had been as “assumed basis” for a two-state solution for many years. That is correct, but Obama’s explicit endorsement of the 1967 borders with the understated “agreed upon land swaps” qualification was the first time a sitting U.S. president had expressed the concept as official policy. So the Obama State Department speech was indeed “a big deal.”

• The oft-stated assertion by Andrea Mitchell, Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent for NBC News, that Netanyahu was “rude” to Obama, and had appeared to be “lecturing the president” during their photo-op session at the White House. What was Netanyahu to do? Israel appears to have been blind-sided by Obama’s bombshell State Department speech. He is the leader of the nationalistic and conservative Likud Party, and is the first sitting Likud prime minister to endorse a two-state solution. Was he to have just sat there silently in the aftermath of a major policy speech that seemed to represent a major shift by the United States to a position that would leave the Jewish State vulnerable, with a pre-1967 waistline that was only nine miles across? Not only for his credibility back in Israel, where the Obama speech set off a firestorm of objections, but for the sake of the security of the nation he is sworn to defend and lead, he was perfectly within his rights to state Israel’s upfront rejection of a return to the 1967 borders.

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• The notion that because of the “Arab Spring,” it is “more urgent than ever” for Israel to come to terms with the Palestinian Authority, even after its president, Mahmoud Abbas, has reconciled with Hamas, the murderous group listed by the very State Department which Obama addressed as a “terrorist organization.” The 1988 Hamas Charter, which it has no intention of amending, explicitly calls for Israel’s destruction and harsh physical violence against Jews. In addition, the official Hamas reaction to the killing of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was that he should be mourned as a “Holy Warrior.” Asking Israel to sit at the table with Hamas in any configuration is like asking the United States to sit at a table with Al Qaeda. To his credit, Obama later added that Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with a group that calls for its destruction.

• The idea that Obama’s speech would somehow lure the Palestinians back to the peace table. Mahmoud Abbas, or Abu Mazen, and Nabil Shaath, and a leader of Fatah, the Abbas faction in the PLO, were quoted by Isabel Kershner in the New York Times last weekend as stating that Obama’s speech “contained little hope for the Palestinians” except for the one sentence that spoke of the borders of a future Palestinian state being based on the 1967 borders with mutually agreed land swaps, which the Times characterized as “a shift in American diplomatic language that addressed a long-held Palestinian demand.” Apparently, Abbas plans to go forward with his plan to do an end run around the peace process and go in September directly to the United Nations General Assembly for official recognition of an independent Palestinian State “within the 1967 borders” and admission to the U.N. as a member. The president’s speech containing that key language seems to have done nothing to derail the plan by Abbas to go forward with the U.N .plan.

Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor, author and winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, was in St. Louis last week as the commencement speaker for Washington University. In an interview (see page 1), Wiesel expressed reservations about the practicality of some of Obama’s assertions, but said that he did not think Obama was anti-Israel. He said he believed the president’s speech was intended to “get the conversation going again” regarding the peace talks. He also said that it was a mistake for Abbas to have made the deal with Hamas. He stressed that the U.S.-Israel relationship was and is strong and that the two democracies would continue to work together towards peace.

Since the establishment of Israel on May 14, 1948, all U.S. presidents have supported strong and positive U.S.-Israel ties. But from time-to-time there have been diplomatic flare-ups that have strained that relationship at least for brief intervals. In the end, the shared values between the U.S., the strongest democracy in the world, and Israel, the only true democracy in the Middle East, not just during the “Arab Spring,” but throughout its 63 years of modern existence not only has endured but became stronger. After the dust settles on the present contretemps, history has shown that the U.S. will remain the best friend Israel has and Israel will continue to be America’s one true ally in that war-torn and violent region of the world.

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Robert A. Cohn is Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the St. Louis Jewish Light.