Bush said in a joint news conference with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah he believed "there's going to be a signed peace treaty by the time I leave office," stressing that Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will "make tough choices in order for there to be lasting peace."

The president, who Wednesday started an eight-day Middle East tour in Israel, said a Palestinian state had to be contiguous. "Swiss cheese isn't going to work when it comes to the territory of a state," he said.

Palestinian officials said that during their meeting, Abbas presented Bush with maps and documents showing how the Israeli settlements, their roads and the separation barrier in the West Bank make it virtually impossible for creating a contiguous state in the West Bank.

They said Abbas urged Bush to push Israel to stop its settlement activities before "nothing is left of the land except small cantons."

Bush, however, did not seem ready to meet Palestinian demands to pressure Israel to halt its settlement expansion plans that were announced shortly after the re-launch of the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations on final status issues in late November at a U.S.-sponsored conference in Annapolis, Maryland. He only reportedly asked the Israelis to remove more than 100 illegal settlement outposts erected after the 2003 international peace Quartet's road map.

The U.S. president also implicitly revoked U.N. Security Council resolutions related to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, confirming widespread belief that Bush's first official visit to the area was to support the Israeli vision of a solution to the Palestinian problem.

In response to a question by the Qatar-based al-Jazeera news channel's Jerusalem correspondent on why he would not hold Israel to a host of U.N. resolutions calling for an end to the Israeli occupation, Bush said they didn't work.

He said the choice was whether to remain "stuck in the past, or to move on," adding that the Palestinians had to decide whether they wanted "a state, or the status quo."

The Palestinians, backed by the Arabs, have been insisting on U.N. Security Council resolutions as the basis of a lasting peace with Israel, namely 242 and 338 that call for an Israeli withdrawal from the territories it occupied in 1967, and Resolution 194 that gave Palestinian refugees, who were forced to flee their homes in 1948, the right of return and compensation.

Arab media highlighted Bush's dismissal of the resolutions, with analysts saying that the American president envisions a peace deal in line with the Israeli vision of a very limited withdrawal from cantons connected by side roads, with the vast bulk of the occupied territories remaining under Israeli control.

They criticized his remarks about being "stuck in the past" as an indication that the Bush administration fully backs an Israeli rejection of the refugees' right to return to their original homes.

For Abbas' Palestinian Authority, which received the U.S. president with a red carpet welcome, Bush's visit to Ramallah and Bethlehem was an important recognition of the Palestinian "existence."

But for the majority of Palestinians, it seemed more of a provocation that would likely further discredit Abbas for agreeing to negotiate according to the vision of a president seen as the strongest supporter of Israel in the history of U.S. administrations.

Some 4,000 policemen sealed off the Muqata to secure the president's visit and Palestinian security forces broke up an angry demonstration with batons, tearing down posters and banners describing Bush as a "war criminal."

Security measures were also very high in a deserted Bethlehem, where Bush started his pilgrimage by praying at the Church of Nativity, one of Christianity's holiest sites, where Jesus Christ is believed to have been born in a stable.

Bush, tracing the footsteps of his favorite philosopher -- Jesus -- whose teachings he says have informed his presidency, is expected to fly north Friday to the Sea of Galilee. It is believed that Jesus delivered many of his most important teachings and healed the sick on the sea's shores.

Bush's Judeo-Christian fervor is widely seen as the reason for his political and ideological proximity to Israel.