After two days of being pounded by Republicans and supporters of Israel, Secretary of State John Kerry bowed to the inevitable on Monday night, clarifying his warning that Israel, if it turns away from the peace process, risks turning into “an apartheid state.” Contrary to some reports, Kerry didn’t apologize for his language, but he did say he wished he hadn’t used that exact term.

“I have been around long enough to also know the power of words to create a misimpression, even when unintentional,” Kerry said in a statement issued by the State Department. “And if I could rewind the tape, I would have chosen a different word to describe my firm belief that the only way in the long term to have a Jewish state and two nations and two peoples living side by side in peace and security is through a two state solution.”

Kerry’s backtracking won’t satisfy Israel’s most zealous advocates in Washington, who, these days, include a lot of conservative Republicans. But it should calm the fake furor that Republicans and members of the Israel lobby have been kicking up since the Daily Beast’s Josh Rogin published some remarks Kerry made last Friday to the Trilateral Commission. (Yes, that Trilateral Commission; it still exists.) In any case, Kerry’s embarrassing retreat doesn’t alter several things that should be plain to anybody with a modicum of objectivity:

1. Most of what Kerry said was indisputable. Michael Kinsley famously said that a political gaffe occurs “when a politician tells the truth—some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.” That’s what Kerry did. If Israel gives up on a two-state solution, it faces the choice of permanently occupying the West Bank and maintaining the status quo or annexing it into Israel proper. In either case, current demographic trends suggest that, within a generation or two, the lands under Jewish control will contain fewer Jews than Arabs. At that point, what will be the future of the Jewish state? In a 2007 interview with the newspaper Haaretz, Ehud Olmert, who was then Israel’s Prime Minister, gave this answer:

If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished… The Jewish organizations, which were our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us, because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents.

In 2010, Ehud Barak, another former Prime Minister, addressed the same dilemma, and said this:

As long as in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Â­Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.

In large part, Kerry was merely echoing the warnings from Olmert and Barak, and using them to support his optimism that, despite recent setbacks, a two-state solution will eventually be reached. Here is what he said:

A two-state solution will be clearly underscored as the only real alternative. Because a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens—or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state. Once you put that frame in your mind, that reality, which is the bottom line, you understand how imperative it is to get to the two-state solution, which both leaders, even yesterday, said they remain deeply committed to.

2. Kerry shouldn’t have used the word “apartheid.” In his statement on Monday night, he pointed out that Olmert, Barak, and even Tzipi Livni, Israel’s current Minister of Justice, have all “invoked the specter of apartheid to underscore the dangers of a unitary state for the future.” That’s true. But from the Israeli perspective they are family. Kerry is Secretary of State—America’s top foreign-policy maker and diplomat. Unfortunately, he still talks like he’s a senator. He’s verbose, he’s passionate, and he’s got boundless energy, but he doesn’t always fully think through how his words will be received. We’ve seen this before, in his comments about Syria and Crimea, and we’ve just seen it again.