Arabs grapple with double emergency

Arab summits deal with any common concern to the 22 states of the "Arab nation" - "ordinary" or "emergency". In practice, the more or less permanent emergency of Palestine has furnished 90% of resolutions.

But when the kings and presidents begin their summit here today, two issues, Palestine and Iraq, will confront them. Each is a grave concern in its own right. But, together, they achieve an altogether higher level of malignancy.

The combination was already menacing at their previous gathering, in Amman, Jordan, last year. But with the intifada now close to spilling into the region as a whole, and with the US setting up Saddam Hussein as the next major target of its "war on terror", the issues are more explosive, more interdependent, than ever.

There were serious doubts about whether this "14th ordinary summit" would convene. Such conferences, meant to be exercises of "strength through unity", have been more like periodic yardsticks of the opposite: of weakness, decline and disarray. King Farouk of Egypt hosted the first in 1946, which resolved to thwart the rise of Israel. But the newborn Jewish state came out of the first Arab-Israeli war much larger than the UN had envisaged, and turned most of the Palestinians into refugees. That has been pretty much the story, if less dramatically, ever since.

The summits were always reactive, an improvised response to some new Israeli challenge or fait accompli . They reflected an ever-deteriorating balance of power. They set reduced goals to match it - only to suffer new defeats and setbacks.

Between Amman and now, the regimes have sunk, in their people's eyes, to a new low of inertia and incompetence. So much so, it came to be said, that simply to hold a summit would be a more damaging parade of impotence than not holding one. Arab commentators wondered sarcastically whether their rulers still considered Palestine an Arab cause at all.

But the summit is to take place,and it could be an important one. With 2,000 journalists present, it is certainly the most scrutinised ever.

Whether or not Israel lets the leader of the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat arrive as the star of the summit, Saudi Arabia is its lynchpin. Crown Prince Abdullah has taken the lead over Iraq and the Palestinian question with his celebrated peace initiative and his forthright opposition to any American military campaign against President Saddam.

Retreat

Historically, the peace plan, however sensible an achievement in itself, amounts to another Arab retreat. It goes further than any of its predecessors, which is why it has incurred reservations from such countries as Syria. Nonetheless, it has earned an unusual degree of Arab support, for the leaders know that the more convincing this pan-Arab offer, the better the chance of escaping the broadening of the conflict from the Palestinian to the Arab arena that they and the Israelis fear.

It is a source of Palestinian pride and Arab shame that, left to fend for themselves, the Palestinians have - with their zeal, stamina and increasingly effective violence and terror - brought Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, to a crossroads: either he renounces his policy of brute force and engages in serious diplomacy in the quest for peace, or he escalates in radically different ways.

Who knows where that could lead? Last week, Eqypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, saw fit to warn Israel not even to think about the mass expulsion of Palestinians which, says the latest poll, 46% of Israelis support.

It is true that the Arab "street" is largely quiescent; no less true, however, that Arab officialdom lives in continuous fear of an eruption of anger directed as much against themselves as Israel, of some independent, popular movement or deed that would force them out of passivity.

It is from the traditionally unruly, multi-confessional Lebanon that the "popular" will could make itself most felt. There, Hizbullah has been growing more strident over its "duty" to support the Palestinians. It has admitted an attempt to smuggle Katyusha rockets into the West Bank via Jordan, and two weeks ago, two unidentified gunmen killed six Israelis near the Lebanese border. Unsure at first, Israel blamed Hizbullah, while officials from the UN mission in Lebanon, Unifil, do not cast serious doubt on the claim.

If Hizbullah is to blame, it was a most ominous provocation, a qualitative jump from mere resistance against Israeli occupation to war on Israel proper. The group knows full well that, if this continues, the Israelis will have no choice under their own security doctrine but to strike back against Lebanon and Syria, with devastating force.

"I think", a Unifil official said, "that the Israelis have been so abnormally quiet about it because they know just how grave a situation they could be getting into."

Not even Mr Sharon wants such an "Arabisation" of the struggle. But so long as he is in charge, Israelis risk getting one. That is why a full-scale Arab adoption of Prince Abdullah's initiative would furnish Israelis with an incentive to drive Mr Sharon and his like from power.

And now add US designs on Iraq to the Arab predicament. It is not that most regimes would be averse to seeing President Saddam go if that business could be swift and surgical, they know that, for wider Arab as well as strictly Iraqi reasons, it cannot.

The circumstances in which the US is preparing an attack is precarious even without the pressing Palestinian drama. With it, the circumstances could prove catastrophic. That is why - with American friends to the fore - Arab leaders seem to have reached an even greater eve-of-summit consensus on Iraq than on the Palestinian question. It is not clear what impression this has made on the Bush administration. The whiff of a trade-off hung about US vice-president Dick Cheney's latest regional tour: President Saddam's head for Mr Sharon's.

It appears that Iraq is the main reason why, with the US troubleshooter General Anthony Zinni back in the region, the US has re-engaged in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in a less biased fashion.

Yet, even if the Arabs accept this trade-off in principle, the US almost certainly will not shed enough of its pro-Israeli bias to win a lasting truce, let alone a political breakthrough. The Arab consensus is more impressive than usual. But the US and Israel may perceive it for what it is: of weakness and desperation. If so, Mr Sharon is liable to resume his rampage, and George Bush to press on regardless against President Saddam.

In which case some pundits forecast that the shock to the Arab system would be so great that if there is ever another pan-Arab summit, some of the leaders present in Beirut might no longer be in a position to attend.