It is now almost certain that representatives of the Israeli and Palestinian Governments will meet in Annapolis, Maryland, on Monday or Tuesday, rash as it is to predict anything about this rapidly shrinking event. Everything else about the meeting is unclear.

The date has slid back from the start of this month, and the schedule has dissolved to a single day. Neither side has agreed what to talk about, and what might be conceded, beyond a few warm-up gestures. Arab countries, whose endorsement would be needed for any serious commitment, will decide only by Friday if they are coming; the signs are that they will, at the last minute, not turn down a place at such a showy event, but the Saudis have been talking down hopes of a high-level delegation.

So the meeting will be an expression of good intentions. The talk now is all of “the day after Annapolis”. It can only in a superficial way fulfil US hopes of shoring up Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, in front of his critics at home, as there will be few rewards he can brandish for having taken part in this encounter. By ignoring Hamas, and its control of Gaza, the meeting tries to sidestep one of the new obstacles to any agreement that cannot be avoided if any progress is to be made.

Abbas, with his base in the West Bank, is no longer able to claim to speak for the Palestinians who have supported Hamas, many of those in Gaza and an increasing number in the West Bank. All the same, it is easy to deride a meeting that has taken the only form possible after such a long deadlock, and after Hamas’s rise to power. The brevity and lack of substance are appropriate; a longer meeting may well achieve no more.

As the gathering finally took on an air of reality there was a flurry of concessions that mean little but represent the entry ticket to the talks. Ehud Olmert, Israel’s Prime Minister, has approved the release of 441 Palestinian prisoners and promised to honour commitments not to build new settlements in the West Bank.

Despite US pressure to make concessions to support Abbas, he refused, however, to freeze existing settlements. Palestinian spokesmen said that Israel’s interpretation of a freeze meant nothing because the “natural growth” it intended to allow the existing settlements – as it has done for a decade – meant steady and intrusive expansion.

Tony Blair, an international envoy to the region, also announced an economic package to boost the Palestinian economy, which was brought almost to a standstill by the Hamas takeover of Gaza, Israel’s measures to seal that territory, and the checkpoints, barriers and permits it has imposed on the West Bank to shield itself from terrorism. This year, after eight meetings with Olmert, Abbas has sent security forces to the troubled West Bank town of Nablus.

The US hoped, in trying to attract senior Arabs to Annapolis, to push Israel to discuss the most controversial “final status” issues such as the sharing of Jerusalem and the return of Palestinian refugees. The road map’s vision of parallel, step-by-step progress towards issues deemed too difficult to discuss at first has long dissolved. There is something to be said now, even if it is quixotic, for having a tilt at the hardest problems.

But Israel has rejected that, and the meeting now seems to be no more than just that: a face-to-face encounter. The Abbas-Olmert talks have shown that there is some value in meeting for its own sake. It’s not nothing – but close to it.

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