RAMALLAH, West Bank — President Obama arrived here Thursday to a ceremonial welcome and a disenchanted Palestinian leadership, whom he will try to convince he is serious about pushing for new peace negotiations with Israel early in his second term.
After a morning in Jerusalem, Obama flew by helicopter to this West Bank city, effectively the Palestinian political capital, for meetings with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. He was met with military honors and the U.S. national anthem before adjourning to Abbas’s office.
Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in an unusual display of agreement Wednesday evening, emphasized the need to revive negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians that would result in the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
The Palestinian national movement, however, is deeply divided between the Islamists of Hamas, who run the Gaza Strip, and the secular nationalist movement of Abbas’s Fatah party. Hamas, an armed movement, calls for Israel’s destruction. Abbas, a veteran of past peace negotiations with Israel, favors a two-state solution.
The tension between the two most powerful Palestinian political movements — one considered a terrorist organization by the United States, the other a viable partner for peace negotiations — was evident Thursday when at least two Gaza-fired rockets landed inside southern Israel.
Israeli police said no one was hurt in the attack, an apparent breach of the cease-fire that ended an eight-day war between Gaza’s armed groups and Israel last November.
Hours earlier, Obama began the second day of his Middle East trip with a symbolic nod to the ancient Jewish presence in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, a history that Israeli supporters believe he underplayed to the detriment of his diplomatic initiatives during his first term.
On a cool spring morning, Obama made the short drive across West Jerusalem to the hilltop Israel Museum, where he toured the wing housing the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Found over roughly a decade beginning in 1946 in cliff-side caves near the Dead Sea, the texts are considered portions of the oldest discovered version of the Hebrew bible.
The area where the scrolls were discovered overlooks the northern Dead Sea, now part of the West Bank. Israel occupied the West Bank, as well as East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Palestinians envision the territory as part of their future state.
Obama’s visit, coupled with Friday’s scheduled wreath-laying ceremony at the grave of Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s founding theoretician, are meant to correct the unsettled impression he left among some Israelis with his 2009 speech to the Muslim world from Cairo. He said then that the modern state of Israel’s founding was more rooted in the tragedy of the Holocaust than in biblical history.
Obama intends to address some of those concerns in a speech Thursday evening at the Jerusalem International Convention Center, the centerpiece of his public diplomatic efforts in Israel.
After a morning in Jerusalem, Obama flew by helicopter to this West Bank city, effectively the Palestinian political capital, for meetings with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. He was met with military honors and the U.S. national anthem before adjourning to Abbas’s office.
Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in an unusual display of agreement Wednesday evening, emphasized the need to revive negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians that would result in the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
The Palestinian national movement, however, is deeply divided between the Islamists of Hamas, who run the Gaza Strip, and the secular nationalist movement of Abbas’s Fatah party. Hamas, an armed movement, calls for Israel’s destruction. Abbas, a veteran of past peace negotiations with Israel, favors a two-state solution.
The tension between the two most powerful Palestinian political movements — one considered a terrorist organization by the United States, the other a viable partner for peace negotiations — was evident Thursday when at least two Gaza-fired rockets landed inside southern Israel.
Israeli police said no one was hurt in the attack, an apparent breach of the cease-fire that ended an eight-day war between Gaza’s armed groups and Israel last November.
Hours earlier, Obama began the second day of his Middle East trip with a symbolic nod to the ancient Jewish presence in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, a history that Israeli supporters believe he underplayed to the detriment of his diplomatic initiatives during his first term.
On a cool spring morning, Obama made the short drive across West Jerusalem to the hilltop Israel Museum, where he toured the wing housing the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Found over roughly a decade beginning in 1946 in cliff-side caves near the Dead Sea, the texts are considered portions of the oldest discovered version of the Hebrew bible.
The area where the scrolls were discovered overlooks the northern Dead Sea, now part of the West Bank. Israel occupied the West Bank, as well as East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Palestinians envision the territory as part of their future state.
Obama’s visit, coupled with Friday’s scheduled wreath-laying ceremony at the grave of Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s founding theoretician, are meant to correct the unsettled impression he left among some Israelis with his 2009 speech to the Muslim world from Cairo. He said then that the modern state of Israel’s founding was more rooted in the tragedy of the Holocaust than in biblical history.
Obama intends to address some of those concerns in a speech Thursday evening at the Jerusalem International Convention Center, the centerpiece of his public diplomatic efforts in Israel.