JERUSALEM: US President Barack Obama faces a stony reception when he travels to the West Bank on Thursday for talks with Palestinian leaders who accuse him of letting Israel ride rough-shod over their dream of statehood.
Obama has said he will not bring any new initiatives to try to revive long-dormant peace talks and has instead come to Israel and the Palestinian territories for simple consultations.
As a reminder of the ever-present risks in the region, militants in the nearby Palestinian enclave, the Gaza Strip, fired two rockets into southern Israel, damaging the yard of house but causing no injuries, police said.
There were no claim of responsibility and Obama is not going to visit Gaza, which is controlled by the Islamist group Hamas.
Arriving in Israel yesterday, the main focus of his initial discussions with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to be pressing regional concerns, primarily Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the civil war in neighbouring Syria.
After repeated run-ins with Netanyahu during Obama’s first term in office, the mood between the two men appeared to be much warmer, angering Palestinians, who blame the 2010 collapse of U.S.-backed peace negotiations on the Israeli leader’s expansion of Jewish settlements on land where they want their state.
Obama is to address the decades-old conflict in talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and also in a keynote speech just hours later to a large audience of carefully screened Israeli students in Jerusalem.
A senior Israeli official urged Abbas to denounce the early morning Gaza rocket fire. ‘Last year he consistently refused to condemn such attacks on Israeli civilians,’ he said.
After the lofty ambitions of Obama’s first term, when he appointed a special envoy to the Middle East on his very first day in charge and said peacemaking was a priority, it was clear that the president has now set the bar significantly lower.
‘I will consider this a success if, when I go back on Friday, I am able to say to myself I have a better understanding of what the constraints are,’ he told a joint news conference on Wednesday, standing alongside Netanyahu.
The three-day visit is Obama’s first to Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank since entering the White House in 2009, and the inaugural foreign trip of a second and final four-year term that began in January.
Sporadic protests flared in the West Bank and Gaza Strip this week, with Palestinians accusing Obama of not doing enough to halt Israeli settlement-building on land seized in the 1967 Middle East war.
In 2009, Obama bluntly told Israel it had to halt settlement construction, but he later backed away from the demand and made no mention of the issue on Wednesday. (PTI)