JAKARTA, Indonesia — President Obama, stepping into an Israeli-Palestinian dispute during a homecoming visit to the world’s largest Muslim majority nation, criticized Israel on Tuesday for its decision to advance the approval of some 1,000 new housing units in East Jerusalem during a sensitive time in the peace negotiations with the Palestinians. “This kind of activity is never helpful when it comes to peace negotiations, and I’m concerned that we’re not seeing each side make the extra effort involved to get a breakthrough,” Mr. Obama said during a joint news conference with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono here. He added, “Each of these incremental steps end up breaking trust.”
Mr. Obama arrived here Tuesday afternoon from New Delhi on a long-awaited visit that is now being cut short by a cloud of volcanic ash headed toward Jakarta. The ash is expected to interfere with air travel on Wednesday, forcing the president to leave several hours ahead of his scheduled departure for Seoul, where he will attend the G-20 conference of world leaders.
Indonesia, where Mr. Obama lived between the ages of 6 and 10 with his mother and step-father, is the second country Mr. Obama is visiting on a 10-day, four-nation Asian tour, and his trip here seems to be star-crossed. Mr. Obama has twice canceled visits at the last minute so he could deal with problems at home. Now Mother Nature has upended his schedule in more ways than one. He planned to visit a mosque and deliver a formal address on Wednesday; the speech is still on, officials said, but the mosque visit appears up in the air. Even his press conference was rearranged, with an intense thunderstorm forcing it inside.
While Mr. Obama received a hometown hero’s welcome — even the Indonesian press corps clapped and cheered when Air Force One touched down — he said he was here “to focus not on the past but on the future,” and, with the exception of offering some personal reflections at the press conference, his time here has been all business. The plight of the Palestinians is a big issue in Indonesia, so much so that President Yudhoyono mentioned it in his opening remarks, saying he had told Mr. Obama that “we need a resolution on Palestine and Israel in a permanent sustainable manner.”
And from the perspective of the United States, Israel’s announcement was ill-timed. It came just as Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was heading to United States for the annual convention of the Jewish Federations of North America. On Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu met with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and he was expected to meet Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton later this week.
Mr. Obama is making outreach to the Muslim world a major theme of his brief visit to Indonesia. He closed his remarks at Tuesday’s press conference with the Muslim greeting “salaam aleikum,” and said he intended to reshape American relations with Muslim nations so they were not “focused solely on security issues” but rather on expanded cooperation across a broad range of areas, from science to education. Aides say the speech he planned to give Wednesday at the University of Indonesia — and still hopes to give, albeit earlier than expected — will build on one he delivered in Cairo last year, in which he called for “a new beginning” with the Muslim world.
At Tuesday’s press conference, Mr. Obama was asked to assess his progress thus far. “I think it’s an incomplete project,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
The last time President Obama was in this island nation, in 1992, he holed up in a rented beachside hut in Bali, where he swam each morning and spent afternoons writing “Dreams From My Father,” the memoir that later became a best seller. In it, he shared memories of his life here as a boy, “running barefoot along a paddy field, with my feet sinking into the cool, wet mud, part of a chain of other brown boys chasing after a tattered kite.”
When Air Force One touched down here in a typical Southeast Asia afternoon thunderstorm, a huge cheer went up inside the State Palace complex — not from ordinary Indonesians, but from the local press corps, watching on television. “Finally, he arrived!” exulted Glenn Jos, a local television cameraman. After descending the steps of his plane, Mr. Obama, in dark suit, accompanied by his wife, Michelle, walked the red carpet that had been laid out for him and stepped into his big black Cadillac limousine. He poked his head out the door to give a short wave. “Yes!” Indonesian reporters shouted.
On Tuesday, the president spoke of how the country has changed since he first arrived here in 1967. “It’s a little disorienting,” he said, noting that then, there was one tall building in downtown Jakarta — a building that has now been eclipsed by many modern skyscrapers — and people got around in “little taxis, but you stood in the back and it was very crowded,” or on bicycle rickshaws.
“Now,” Mr. Obama said, “as president I can’t even see all the traffic because they block all the streets.”
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