JERUSALEM — It began, as it had last time and the time before, with a celebratory handshake and soaring rhetoric about a chance for peace in this ravaged land.
Tuesday's landmark summit, during which the Israelis and the Palestinians announced that they would cease violence, harked back to previous chapters of peacemaking -- all with unhappy endings.
The last time the two sides appeared this hopeful was in 1993, when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat sealed the Oslo peace accords with a famous handshake on the White House lawn. The accords sputtered for years until the Palestinian uprising broke out in 2000.
In June 2003, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas, then prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, clasped hands at a vaunted summit in Aqaba, Jordan, to announce a renewed peace effort that dissolved three months later into a familiar cycle of suicide bombings and Israeli reprisals.
But this time several key conditions have changed. Both sides see a window of opportunity after Arafat's death and Abbas' recent landslide election to the presidency. The Israelis long considered Arafat an obstacle to peace. Abbas has what many consider to be a fresh mandate to negotiate with the Israelis, and he has worked to draw armed Palestinian groups into the political process.
Many analysts saw Palestinians' enthusiasm about Abbas as a sign that they were growing tired of the conflict and wanted a different approach. Israel, on the other hand, was preparing to unilaterally pull out of the Gaza Strip and undoubtedly saw an opportunity to get Palestinian forces to fill the security vacuum.
The Bush administration's stated commitment to involve itself more in Middle East diplomacy, after largely steering clear during the last four years, is also raising hopes.
The administration says Abbas' election provides the best opportunity for peace in years and breathes new life into the "road map" plan for peace. That initiative -- sponsored by the United States, Russia, European Union and United Nations -- has been stalled since its debut in Aqaba because neither side has met its initial obligations.
Israel and the Palestinians offered fresh endorsements of the blueprint Tuesday, but it remained unclear how they would meet their obligations under the plan, which envisions creation of an independent Palestinian state by the end of this year.
