The Annual Arab Summit Meeting: A Show of No Unity INSS Insight No. 99.

April
7, 2009
Brom, Shlomo

On March 30, 2009, at the end of a fruitless day of discussions in Doha, Qatar, the annual Arab
summit, normally attended every year by all members of the Arab League, came to a close. The
summit ended earlier than planned because of the participants’ inability to close the gaps
between their positions. This was the end of a show of no unity.
The summit was characterized by deep differences of opinion between the two blocs
that divide the Arab world: the bloc of pragmatic nations led by Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which
works with the United States, and the bloc of nations with close ties to Iran, foremost among
them Syria. The first manifestation of the split was the decision of some of the Arab leaders to
decline to attend the summit. Only seventeen of the twenty-two leaders of the Arab League
nations chose to participate. Prominently absent was Egyptian president Husni Mubarak, who
sent a low ranking official to attend the summit in his stead. He was thus expressing his
dissatisfaction with the host country, Qatar, which during Israel's recent military campaign in the
Gaza Strip chose to side with the nations closely allied with Iran, and even tried to replace
Egypt as the mediator between Hamas and Israel. Egypt’s displeasure on this issue joined its
anger at the unabated attacks by the Qatari al-Jazeera network on the Egyptian regime.
The summit did not succeed in reaching agreement on most of the main issues on the
agenda, and therefore the concluding statement lacked even a single operative paragraph. The
only clear agreement reached at the summit places Arab nations in outright conflict with
Western public opinion. The summit defiantly expressed solidarity with Sudanese president
Omar al-Bashir, who has been issued an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court in
The Hague for his involvement in the genocide in Darfur. The concluding statement ignored the
divisions between the two streams of the Arab world, preferred not to deal with most of the
issues, and satisfied itself with the general call for Arab nations to set aside their differences of
opinion through dialogue and to focus on the interest of the Arab nation as a whole.
In the absence of agreements, it was the conduct of Libyan president Muammar
Qaddafi that drew the attention of the Arab and international media. He first initiated a
confrontation with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and then publicly reconciled with him, while
presenting himself as the leader of the Arab world and all of Africa.
As is standard at Arab summits, the conflict with Israel occupied a central place on the
agenda. The concluding statement repeated the usual Arab positions. It called for the
establishment of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital,
as well as a just and agreed-upon solution (using the language of the Arab peace initiative) for
Palestinian refugees without settling them in host countries. It also called for the return of the
Golan Heights to Syria. The statement did not refer to the Lebanese demand that Shab'a Farms
and the village of Rajer be returned to Lebanon, despite the intervention of the Lebanese
president who sought to have these included.
There was no decision on the issue that in the months leading up to the summit was
presented as central – the fate of the Arab peace initiative. For some time, Syria has been trying
to spearhead a move that would set a time limit on the Arab peace initiative. At the special
summit held in Doha during the fighting in the Gaza Strip, Syria’s representatives contended
that the Arab peace initiative had lost its validity because of Israel’s conduct. Indirect reference
to the Arab peace initiative was made in the concluding statement with reference to a
commitment to peace as a strategic goal, to which was added a declaration that Israel must
show willingness to move towards peace.
On the Palestinian issue, the summit also condemned the war in the Gaza Strip,
reiterated its support for the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas as the legitimate
representative of the Palestinian people, and called for reconciliation among Palestinians and
the establishment of a Palestinian unity government. The support for Abbas is significant
because Hamas claims that according to the Palestinian constitution Abbas’ term as president
has expired. Furthermore, contrary to the special summit convened during the war in the Gaza
Strip, Hamas was not invited to this summit and as in previous annual summits, it was attended
only by state representatives and representatives of the PA.
 The summit conference showed the weakness of the Arab world and the deep split
within it. It demonstrated that the real players affecting central processes in the Middle East are
those who do not participate in Arab League summits, namely Iran, Israel, Turkey, and the non-
state players in the Arab world.
From Israel’s perspective, one of the major significances of this Arab summit was the
weakness of regional dialogue as a means for advancing the political process. From the
agreements between Netanyahu and Barak that led to the Labor Party joining the coalition, it
may be possible to infer that the Israeli government wants to base the political channel vis-à-vis
the Arab states on the Arab peace initiative, while attempting to forge a regional dialogue. An
analysis of the current state of the Arab world implies that this approach is an unsound basis for
a political process, especially if it is seen as an attempt to bypass the bilateral channels of
negotiations.