Knight Ridder Washington BureauJERUSALEM - President Bush began an eight-day Middle East peace mission Wednesday as Israeli leaders warned him and the world not to forget about the regional threat that Iran poses.
Standing on the airport tarmac with Bush looking on shortly after his arrival, Israeli President Shimon Peres relegated peace talks with the Palestinians to secondary status and issued a warning to Iran.
We take your advice not to underestimate the Iranian threat," Peres said. "Iran should not underestimate our resolve for self-defense."
While Bush is trying to shore up fragile Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, Iran also is central to the talks that he's holding across the region in the coming week.
Iran is the main issue," said Yossi Levy, a spokesman for Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's minister of strategic affairs and point man on Iran.
Later, at Peres' home in Jerusalem, Bush said he was making his first official visit to Israel as president with high hopes.
The role of the United States will be to foster a vision of peace," he said. "The role of the Israeli leadership and the Palestinian leadership is going to do the hard work necessary to define a vision."
Israeli and Palestinian negotiators have made little significant headway since Bush hosted a Middle East summit in November in Annapolis, Md.
Talks returned to square one after Annapolis as the two sides bickered over obstacles to negotiations. The Palestinians, joined by the Bush administration and others, complained that Israel had undermined the talks by announcing plans to build more than 300 new housing units in East Jerusalem, an area that Palestinians expect to become the capital of a Palestinian state.
Israelis have complained that daily rocket fire from Gaza, a predominantly Palestinian area under the control of the militant group Hamas, makes negotiating difficult.
Stephen Hadley, Bush's nation security adviser, conceded that the dueling issues had become "distractions" that had held up progress.
What the president is going to say is these are serious issues, there are forums where they can be addressed, but (Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud) Abbas and (Israeli Prime Minister Ehud) Olmert need to get the negotiating track started," Hadley said. " They're the only ones who really can do it effectively."
The difficulties that negotiators face were clear Wednesday when militants in Gaza fired at least eight crude Qassam rockets at southern Israel, striking two homes in Sderot and slightly injuring one person.
In response, the Israeli military attacked in northern Gaza, killing two civilians, according to Gaza medical officials.
Bush's arrival was met with wall-to-wall live coverage on Israeli television, which showed his airport arrival, his 20-minute ride aboard a Marine One helicopter to Jerusalem and his convoy to the King David Hotel.
Thousands of police cordoned off the area around the hotel as a security blimp hovered over it.
Bush was to meet Wednesday night with Olmert and planned to meet Abbas on Thursday at his presidential compound in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
The compound is home to a new mausoleum where the body of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is buried. But Bush, who publicly snubbed Arafat when he was the Palestinian Authority president, isn't expected to visit the grave.
The Bush administration has sought to downplay any expectations that the visit will lead to significant breakthroughs, something that led to caustic coverage in the Israeli press.
Ben Caspit, a leading analyst for Israel's newspaper Ma'ariv, called the visit a "requiem for a president" who has little power or influence in his final year in office.
He is a lame elephant and we are his china shop," Caspit wrote in Wednesday's paper. "His time is limited, his intimidation power is low and no one really takes him into account."
(c) 2008, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
