By Ofira Koopmans and Jeff Abramowitz, DPA
Jerusalem : US President George W. Bush Wednesday said he was “optimistic” as he opened a three-day visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories aimed at advancing difficult, ambitious efforts to reach a peace deal by the end of his term.
“I come with high hopes,” Bush told Israeli President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem, adding that while his role was to “foster a vision of peace,” the “role of the Israeli and the Palestinian leadership is to do the hard work necessary to define that vision.”
On landing in Tel Aviv earlier in the day, he expressed support for Israel as a “Jewish state,” and said he saw a “new opportunity for peace here in the Holy Land and for peace across the region.”
“The bond between the state of Israel and the United States of America is unshakable. It is based on the most fundamental common ideas of freedom and democracy,” Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a carefully orchestrated welcoming ceremony packed with dignitaries, including leading Israeli politicians, state officials and Jewish, Muslim and Christian religious leaders.
Bush’s visit is the first of a US president to Israel and the Palestinian areas since December 1998, and his Israeli hosts went through lengths to make the visit proceed without a hitch.
More than 10,000 police officers, at least 8,000 of them in Jerusalem, were deployed to maintain order and secure the areas the president’s motorcade was to pass, and key roads in central Jerusalem were blocked.
Although Bush visited Israel in 1998 as governor of Texas, it was his first visit to Israel and the West Bank since taking office.
The president rekindled the peace process by hosting the Annapolis, Maryland, conference Nov 27, when Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas agreed to end a seven-year freeze in negotiations with the ambitious goal of reaching a deal by the end of this year.
But since the Annapolis conference, the Israeli-Palestinian talks got off to a slow start, amid escalating rocket attacks from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip at southern Israel, and Palestinian anger over Israeli plans to build two Jewish settlement east of and in southern Jerusalem – Ma’aleh Adumim and Har Homa.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice indicated the issue of settlements would be high on the agenda when she told the Jerusalem Post in an interview published Wednesday that “Har Homa is a settlement the US has opposed from the very beginning.”
US National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley conceded that since Annapolis “there have been a lot of, obviously, distractions,” but he said, “it’s pretty early in the process.”
“The Palestinians are very concerned, obviously, about settlements; the Israelis are very concerned, obviously, about the rocket attacks coming out of Gaza,” he told reporters en route to Israel.
“What the president is going to say is these are serious issues, there are forums where they can be addressed, but Abbas and Olmert need to get the negotiating track started,” he said.
Israel has agreed to a partial settlement freeze, promising it will not allow “outward expansion” of existing settlements. But it has vowed to continue to build in areas in and near Jerusalem it wants to keep as part of a future peace deal.
An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman said Israel was trying to “balance” between its obligations toward the US and Palestinians, and its desire to “preserve the character and contiguity of Jerusalem.”
“There’s a difference of opinion between Israel and the US, especially regarding Jerusalem,” he conceded.
Despite their ongoing arguments over settlements and security, Israel and the Palestinians are scheduled to open the long-delayed negotiations on the “core issues” of their mutual conflict, including Jerusalem, borders and refugees, next week, he said.
Olmert and Abbas finalised the procedural set-up of the negotiations in a meeting Tuesday, and the heads of the Israeli and Palestinian negotiating teams would for the first time address these core issues in a meeting next week, he said. He was as yet unable to give the exact day.
Bush held an in-depth meeting with Olmert Wednesday afternoon. He was due to hold talks with Abbas and Acting Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in Ramallah on Thursday.