Obama's Israel Itinerary Skirts Settlements but Not Symbolism
President Barack Obama will embrace Jewish history while skirting the morass of West Bank settlements when he visits Israel this week - a selective itinerary laden with diplomatic signals.
The tour, running from Wednesday to Friday, is meant to warm Israelis to the cool-tempered, second-term Democratic leader who is prodding their rightist prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to hold fire on Iran and make way for a Palestinian state.
Some in Israel smart at the fact Obama took this long to come and that in a speech in Cairo in 2009, he appeared to argue that the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East stemmed from the Holocaust - a European calamity foreign to many Arabs.
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