"Did Bush and Rice make a real distinction between Fatah and Hamas? Was their only question about PA President Mahmoud Abbas whether he was strong enough or supported enough internally to do what it takes to implement the road map?
Yes. Theirs was the American view that, after the death of Arafat, the Palestinian leadership no longer viewed terrorism as either legitimate or sensible, and that they now genuinely wanted a peace agreement. One difficulty was that while the Palestinian leadership was finally becoming more sensible, extremism and terrorism were on the rise in the Arab world as a whole. So they were now doing this against a background that was even less propitious for moderation than it would have been 20 years earlier.""