Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was ready to start peace talks with the Palestinians immediately but stressed that Palestinians must recognize Israel as as a Jewish state.
Mr Netanyahu was speaking after a meeting with US President Barack Obama this afternoon.
Mr Obama urged Israelis and Palestinians to "seize this opportunity and this moment" for peace.
The two men met earlier today in the White House to grapple with rare US-Israeli differences over Middle East peacemaking and how to deal with Iran.
"Mr. Netanyahu will focus on the subject of a nuclear Iran," his national security adviser, Uzi Arad, told reporters on the eve of the meeting.
"There is a sense of urgency on our side," Arad said, calling a nuclear-armed Iran a threat to Israel's existence. "The prime minister will emphatically emphasized the element of urgency."
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said this month that world powers should take action against Iran if it does not curb its nuclear activities by August.
If diplomacy fails, Israeli leaders have not ruled out military strikes against Iran, which maintains it is enriching uranium for power generation.
Wading into the thicket of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy four months after taking office, Mr Obama pressed the hawkish Israeli leader to endorse Palestinian statehood and freeze Jewish settlement expansion on occupied land.
He said Israel has a clear obligation to stop building settlements under the road map for peace agreed in 2003.
Mr Netanyahu's effort to shift the focus of stalled peace talks away from tough issues such as borders and the future of Jewish settlements could mean a rocky road ahead in traditionally strong US-Israeli relations.
It puts him at odds with Mr Obama, who has endorsed the goal of Palestinian independence, a cornerstone of US policy for years, and has pledged to keep peacemaking high on his agenda.
Underscoring the obstacles Mr Obama faces, an Israeli official confirmed that contractors had been asked for plans to expand a settlement in the occupied West Bank, a project the United States has already condemned as problematic to peace moves.
Despite diverging views, the two men, meeting for the first time since both took office, were expected to tread carefully in talks that could set the tone for a still-emerging U.S. strategy to revive stalled peace talks.
Mr Obama sees engagement in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking - in contrast to the Bush administration's largely hands-off approach - as crucial to repairing the U.S. image in the Muslim world and to convincing moderate Arab states to join a united front against Iran.
Reuters