Can Arab leaders, gathering today in Beirut, overshadowed by the worst violence in the region for decades, speak with one voice? David Hirst assesses the prospects for their summit.
Arab summits deal with any matter of common concern to the 22 member-states of the "Arab nation". They can be ordinary or emergency. In practice, the more or less permanent emergency of Palestine has furnished 90 per cent of their resolutions.
But when the kings and presidents convene today, two issues, Palestine and Iraq, will confront them. Each is grave but, together, they achieve an altogether higher level of malignancy.
The combination was already menacing at their last gathering, in Amman last year, but, with the intifada, or Palestinian uprising, now close to spilling over into the region as a whole, and with the US setting up Saddam Hussein as the next major target of its war on terror, they are more explosive, more interdependent than ever.
There were serious doubts whether this summit would ever convene. Meant to be exercises of strength through unity, such conferences have really 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, militarily if necessary.
But the new-born 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 ever since.
Summits were always reactive, some 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 yet new defeats and setbacks.
Between Amman and now the regimes have sunk, in their peoples' 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 sarcastically wondered whether their rulers still considered Palestine an Arab cause at all.
But not only is the summit to take place, it could be a very important one. Yasser Arafat - if Sharon lets him come - will be its star, but Saudi Arabia its linchpin.
Crown Prince Abdullah has taken the lead in both zones of crisis, with his now celebrated peace initiative and with his forthright opposition to any US campaign to bring down Saddam by force.
Historically, the peace plan, however much of an achievement in itself, amounts to yet another Arab retreat; it goes further than any of its predecessors. That is why it has incurred reservations from such countries as Syria. None the less, 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 both they and the Israelis fear.
That things have reached the dangerous point they have, Arab commentators say, is the Palestinians' pride - and the Arabs' shame. Left to fend for themselves, they have - with their zeal, stamina and increasingly effective violence and terror - brought Sharon to a crossroads: either he renounces his policy of brute force and engages in serious peace-seeking diplomacy or he escalates in radically new ways.
Who knows how far those could go? Last week President Mubarak saw fit to warn the Israelis not even to think of the "transfer" - or mass expulsion - of Palestinians which, according to the latest poll, 46 per cent of them would back.
It is true that Arab popular opinion is abnormally quiescent; no less true, however, that Arab officialdom lives in continuous fear of an eruption of anger directed as much against itself as Israel, of some independent, popular movement, or deed, that would force it out of its passivity.
It is from traditionally unruly, multi-confessional Lebanon that the popular will could make itself most devastatingly felt. There, Hizbullah has of late been growing increasingly strident about its "duty" to support the Palestinians. It has publicly admitted a bid to smuggle Katyusha rockets into the West Bank through Jordan. And two weeks ago two unidentified assailants killed six Israelis two kilometres from the Lebanese frontier.
Initially unsure, the Israelis laid the blame squarely on Hizbullah; UNIFIL officials do not cast serious doubt on the claim. If Hizbullah did do it, it was a most ominous provocation, a qualitative jump from mere resistance against Israeli occupation to war on Israel proper.
It knows full well that, if this goes on, the Israelis will have no choice, in accordance with their clearly enunciated security doctrine, but to strike back against Lebanon and Syria with devastating force.
No Israeli, not even Sharon, wants such an arabisation of the struggle. But so long as he is in charge they greatly risk getting one. That is why a full-scale Arab adoption of Abdullah's initiative would furnish all Israelis who realise that with an incentive to drive him and his like from power.
And now add US designs on Iraq to the summiteers' predicament. It is not that most regimes would be averse to seeing Saddam go, if the business of removing him could be swift, surgical and guaranteed to succeed. But they know that, for wider Arab as well as strictly Iraqi, reasons, it cannot.
Even without the Palestine drama, the conditions in which the US is apparently preparing to go about it would be bad enough, but with it they would, they say, be catastrophic - and as liable, they obviously fear, to bring their own overthrow as Saddam's. That is why the Arab leaders seem to have reached an even greater eve-of-summit consensus on Iraq than on Palestine.
It is not clear what impression this consensus has made on the Bush administration. The whiff of a trade-off hung about Vice-President Cheney's latest tour of the region: Saddam's head for Sharon's. Iraq is the main reason why, with trouble-shooter Antony Zinni back in the region, the US has re-engaged in the Israeli-Palestinian arena, and in a somewhat less biased fashion than before.
Yet even if the Arabs accept this trade-off in principle - and there is little sign that they do - the US has not, and 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 Americans and Israelis may perceive it for what, in good measure, it is: the consensus of weakness and desperation. If so, Sharon is liable in due course to resume his rampage, and Bush to press on against Saddam.
In which case, some Arab commentators forecast, the shock to the Arab system would be so great that, if there ever was another summit, some at least of the Arab leaders might no longer be there to attend it.
• David Hirst is a journalist and Middle East analyst based in Beirut