For Mahmoud Abbas the future is bleak, even after the UN Human Rights Council endorsed a report condemning both Israeli and Hamas for their actions in last winter’s Gaza war.

Although the Palestinian President managed to beef up the resolution — with additional clauses condemning Israel’s restrictions of movement for Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the ongoing Israeli blockade of Hamas-run Gaza — it is unlikely to be enough to wash away the stain of his initial reluctance to back Judge Richard Goldstone’s report.

Mr Abbas, popularly known as Abu Mazen, was already weak before the latest fiasco. His public opposition to violent resistance to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank has set him at odds with many militant groups, still popular in the Palestinian territories, while his endless talks with Ehud Barak, the former Israeli Prime Minister, resulted only in the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

He had hoped that the new US Administration’s call for a total settlement freeze would bolster his standing and refused to enter any talks with the new right-wing Israeli Government of Binyamin Netanyahu until settlement expansion was halted.

Mr Netanyahu simply stared the White House down, refusing to halt settlement growth and allowing the issue to snag on haggling over whether existing settlements should be allowed to build extra kindergartens and house extensions.

Faced with the damning report from the UN-appointed South African judge, who has served on tribunals looking into war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, Israel said that an endorsement would bring the peace process to a grinding halt — even though, by the admission of Avigdor Lieberman, the Foreign Minister, Israel was not expecting a peace deal for years anyway.

Mr Abbas then made what may prove to be a fatal mistake. He bowed to US and Israeli pressure to delay backing by his Palestinian Authority for the Goldstone report, a move seen by Palestinians as a betrayal of their struggle and their war dead. Senior aides scrabbled to redress the error as Hamas exploited the gaffe as evidence that Mr Abbas was an Israeli “collaborator”.

“Mahmoud Abbas might as well be considered a dead man; Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak [now Defence Minister] have killed him,” said a commentary in the Israeli centre-left daily Haaretz.

“To force the chairman of the Palestinian Authority, of all people, to withdraw his demand for a discussion of the report — that is an Israeli-American diktat tantamount to pressuring him to commit hara-kiri. Extortion through the use of threats has paid off, and once again there is no party to speak with, nor will there be in the near future. This is what happens when one turns a partner into a collaborator.”

Hamas has already used the Palestinian Authority’s dithering over the Goldstone report as an excuse not to pursue a reconciliation deal designed to heal the wounds of a Palestinian civil war two years ago that split the territories between the West Bank, controlled by Mr Abbas, and the Gaza Strip, held by the Iranian-backed Hamas. Reuniting the Palestinians would have greatly enhanced Mr Abbas’s domestic standing.

The Palestinians may go the polls next summer to choose a new president and government: it is unlikely that the electorate will have forgotten his latest humiliation by then.

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