xxxvi The Crooked Course However, compromises among the Quartet members led to ambiguities which gave the parties the opportunity to make radically different interpretations of their obligations under the plan. The Israeli side claimed that the Road Map called for security first—a complete end of Palestinian violence—before any negotiations could start. This strategy was called sequentialism. The Palestinian side, and the international community at large, supported a strategy of parallelism that called for progress on both security and political issues to happen in lock-step. The collision of the concepts of parallelism and sequenti- alism made it impossible to reach the final destination envisioned in the Road Map. With gridlock in the formal negotiating process, civil society groups tried to take the initiative. One example of several is the Geneva Accords of December 2003 led by PLO official Yasser Abed Rabbo and former Israeli Minister Yossi Beilin. The stalemate in the process continued until Ehud Olmert’s election as Prime Minister in 2006. Through intense negotiations facilitated by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her team, the parties came close to striking a deal which would have pushed the peace process forward. However, as the end game of this phase of the negotiations, also known as the Annapolis process, unfolded, Prime Minister Olmert had to step down because of an indictment for alleged financial misconduct. At the same time also, a new wave of rockets emanating from Gaza, lead to a military operation in the Strip (Operation “Cast Lead’). The scene and characters changed in early 2009 with the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States, and Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister of Israel for a second time. Shortly after his inauguration, President Obama attempted to resuscitate the peace process with the appointment of a new high-level special envoy, Senator George Mitchell. An absolute freeze on settlements, including in