President Barack Obama expressed hope today of making serious progress in Middle East peacemaking this year and said Israelis and Palestinians had to "get serious" and make tough compromises.
On a visit to Germany, Mr Obama repeated his call for Israel to halt settlement expansion in the West Bank, but he also pushed the Palestinians to improve security and pressed Arab states to match any Israeli peace steps with confidence-building gestures.
"The Palestinians have to get serious about creating the security environment that is required for Israel to feel confident. Israelis are going to have to take some difficult steps," he said.
Mr Obama, who sees Israeli-Palestinian progress as crucial to repairing the US image in the Muslim world, was speaking a day after delivering a speech in Cairo in which he offered Muslims a "new beginning" with the United States.
Germany is the third stop on a trip which started in Saudi Arabia. Tomorrow, he will attend commemorations in France marking the 65th anniversary of the second World War D-Day landings in France.
"I am confident that if we stick with it ... we can make some serious progress this year," Obama said of the peace process at a news conference in Dresden with German chancellor Angela Merkel.
"The moment is now for us to act on what we all know to be the truth, which is that each side is going to have to make some difficult compromises."
After Dresden, Mr Obama toured the site of the Buchenwald concentration camp, paying homage to the victims of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews died.
The visit will send a signal to Jerusalem that while he did not visit Israel on his maiden trip to the Middle East, its security is still central to US foreign policy.
"To this day we know there are those who insist the Holocaust never happened, a denial of a fact or truth that is baseless, ignorant and hateful. This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts," Obama said, with Merkel and camp survivors Elie Wiesel and Bertrand Herz standing behind him.
Mr Obama has made finding a solution to the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict a top foreign policy priority and has plunged into Middle East politics, often a quagmire for his predecessors, early in his presidency.
Former president George W. Bush was seen as taking a hands-off approach to Middle East peacemaking until late in his administration. Muslims saw Mr Bush as biased towards Israel.
"I believe with the new US administration, with President Obama, there is a unique opportunity to see to it that the negotiation process is revived," Ms Merkel said.
Mr Obama said he was concerned his recent comments on the need for Israel to accept a Palestinian state were getting a disproportionate amount of attention. Palestinians needed to take steps, too, he said.
"We have still not seen a firm commitment from the Palestinian Authority that they can control some of the border areas that Israel is going to be concerned about if there was going to be a two-state solution," he said.
If this was not solved, the Israelis would have "trouble moving forward," Mr Obama said.
He called on Arab states to "make some hard choices" by opening up trade and offering diplomatic exchanges with Israel if it made "tough commitments." Until now, Arab states have said Israel must fulfil its obligations under the 2003 "road map" peace plan before they will reciprocate.
Along with the Middle East crisis, Mr Obama and Ms Merkel also discussed the nuclear stand-off with Iran, the global financial crisis, climate change and the fate of prisoners at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay.
Mr Obama is hugely popular in Germany, but relations between Washington and Berlin have been less than smooth since Mr Obama took office in January. Facing an election in September, Ms Merkel has resisted US pressure to take inmates from Guantanamo and send more troops to Afghanistan.
The brevity of Mr Obama's stay in Germany and his decision not to go to Berlin led to German media speculation of a rift, but the president dismissed this as "wild speculation".
Reuters