Obama tours Israel’s symbolic sites on last day of visit

PanARMENIAN.Net - On the last day of a visit to Israel, U.S. President Barack Obama paid his respects at the tomb of the founder of modern Zionism and also the grave of a murdered Israeli prime minister, who has become a symbol of the peace process, Reuters reported.

He then visited Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, adding layers of symbolic gestures to a trip short of real substance, but laden with presidential appeals for both Israelis and Palestinians to resume long-stalled peace talks.

The president is due to fly to nearby Jordan in the afternoon for talks with King Abdullah, a key U.S. Middle East ally, about an array of pressing regional problems, including the civil war in neighboring Syria.

Obama walked through Jerusalem's Mount Herzl cemetery, laying a wreath on the black marble tomb of Theodor Herzl, the Zionist visionary who died more than four decades before the 1948 founding of Israel.

Officials said the visit was aimed at correcting an impression the president had given in a speech in Cairo in 2009, where he appeared to argue that the legitimacy of the Jewish state stemmed from the Holocaust.

"Nothing could be more powerful," Obama said in Yad Vashem's Hall of Names, a memorial to the six million Jews killed by the Nazis in World War Two.

Obama also laid a wreath at the final resting place of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli statesman assassinated in 1995 by a Jewish extremist enraged by his efforts to make peace with Palestinians.