Mahmoud Abbas: Pressing the Flesh for Peace

False Dawn at Annapolis
Bush hosts Olmert and Abbas at a Mideast peace conference in Annapolis, Md., in November 2007. The conference, attended by leaders of most of the moderate Arab regimes, inaugurated a year of open-ended talks between Olmert and Abbas. These were noncommittal negotiations aimed at producing a "shelf agreement," i.e., a peace plan to be implemented at a more auspicious moment. But they failed to achieve even that much. Olmert found himself fighting corruption allegations at home, which eventually forced him to stand down; Bush was a lame duck in his final year in office; and Abbas was left watching on the sidelines a year later as the dominant Israeli-Palestinian interaction was the bloody war in Gaza.

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