Barack Obama, the US Democratic presidential candidate, is meeting Israeli and Palestinian leaders in Israel and the occupied West Bank as part of a wider tour of the Middle East.
"I am here on this trip to reaffirm the special relationship between Israel and the United States and my abiding commitment to Israel's security and my hope that I can serve as an effective partner, whether as a US senator or as president," Obama said after meeting Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, on Wednesday.
Earlier on Wednesday he met Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, and Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the opposition Likud party, before visiting the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem.
Obama will later meet Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, in Jerusalem, before travelling to the occupied West Bank to meet Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president.
"Obama is a man whose foreign policy we don't know that much about so far, certainly as far as Middle East policy goes. This visit is designed to join up the dots, if you like," Jacky Rowland, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Jerusalem, said.
"It will also tick the Israel box in terms of voters in the US, where there is a very broad consensus of support for Israel."
'Commitment' to Israel
The Illinois senator had angered many Palestinians when he called for Jerusalem to "remain the capital of Israel and ... remain undivided" during a speech to a pro-Israel lobby in June.
Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state and say the city's future should be decided as part of peace negotiations
Israel has occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem since the 1967 war.
Upon arriving at the airport outside Tel Aviv, Obama said Tuesday's bulldozer attack was "just one reminder of why we have to work diligently, urgently and in a unified way to defeat terrorism".
He also said he was "absolutely committed to work with the Israeli government to make sure these occurrences do not happen".
Obama also expressed his wish to reinforce the "historic special relationship between the United States and Israel".
Iraq issue
The US Democratic presidential candidate, who held talks with King Abdullah of Jordan on Tuesday, flew in from Iraq where he had spent two days in talks with Iraqi politicians and US military figures.
Speaking at a press conference in Amman, Obama reiterated his belief that Afghanistan, where he began his tour over the weekend, should be the "central front" of the US's so-called war on terror.
He also emphasised that while he believed security in Iraq had improved, there was still the need for a "political solution" and said the goal was still "to have US troops no longer engaged in combat operations in Iraq".
"I welcome the growing consensus in the United States and Iraq for a timeline," he said.
"My view is we can safely deploy in 16 months so that our combat brigades are out of Iraq in 2010."