Any initiative that brings Israelis and Palestinians together should be welcomed, no matter how unlikely it is to change the facts on the ground. But however much hope the world had for peace in the run up to the Annapolis conference on Tuesday, it was clear that little would be achieved in this gathering of the down and discredited.

For Bush, this has been a clear attempt to achieve something positive out of the spiralling vortex of damage that his foreign policy has achieved. For Olmert, his domestic popularity stands in abysmal single figures making even Abbas look popular, who in turn has less authority over Palestinians than the mayor of the small Palestinian town of Qalqilia.

The Annapolis meeting was not a gathering of the willing, but rather the politically and historically destitute who know their time is up and need to deliver "something", not for the sake of justice or peace, but rather for themselves. Thus like numerous other summits, meetings and conferences since Oslo in 1993, Annapolis will suffer the same fate: failure.

At the conclusion of the conference, Bush proclaimed that Israel and the Palestinian Authority had agreed at the talks to hold future talks "in order to reach an agreement by the end of 2008". So the conference achieved nothing of substance, as fully expected. From December 12, biweekly meetings will take place until peace is concluded - Bush hopes, within his tenure.

You do not need to be a political scientist to see the fallacy of any positive outcome within 12 months. That raises concerns and questions. First, who benefits from Annapolis? It is clear that, having assembled 40 countries, America can show it still wields great power among the monarchs, dictators and demagogues of the Middle East. The mere presence of all these people, to what transpired to be a pre-negotiation talk, provides Bush with some foreign credibility.

For the Israelis, it will allow them, via the Americans to call upon the neighbouring Arab states to end the boycott and normalise relations with Israel. It is more likely that Annapolis will be the beginning of the normalisation of Arab-Israeli relations rather than peace between Israel and Palestine.

For Abbas, Annapolis is the final ray of hope that will validate his political position as leader of the Palestinians. His future depends on discrediting Hamas by proving negotiations can achieve what resistance cannot. However, the evidence of what little Abbas has achieved since the Hamas-Fatah rift indicates that it is more likely that the opposite will occur. With Olmert's weakness, he will fail to confront the extremist Jewish settlers, whose vision is of further expansion rather than retraction from the West Bank. After the debacle in Lebanon last summer, equally the army is unlikely to take any heed in allowing the Palestinians to have its own borders. As for refugees and Jerusalem, there are no signs that Olmert or the Israeli public are ready to compromise. Despite Hamas being sidelined at present it may in the end come out to be stronger.

Perhaps the greatest concern lies in the consequences of the predicated failure of Annapolis. When Bill Clinton, in his closing days as president, like Bush, put peace in the Holy Land at the top of his agenda and subsequently failed to deliver, we ended up with the second intifada that claimed more than 4,000 Palestinian and 1,000 Israeli lives. In the midst of the present global political mayhem - with the geographical and political split between the Palestinians, a weak Israeli leader, a warmongering US leadership and Arab streets at odds with its leadership - Annapolis may provide the seeds for a new Middle East but one totally different to what the architects in Annapolis have designed.