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From of all of this it is clear why there was no chance of agreement over holding an emergency summit
of the Arab League in Cairo on Wednesday. The reports that came out of Cairo told of harsh exchanges
between the camps. One member of the “extremist” camp was shocked that the chairman of the Arab
League, former Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa, did not even mention the demand to hold a
summit. The Egyptians shrugged and claimed they did not brief Moussa about what he should say in his
speech.

Waiting for an Israeli Victory

All of this has a clear bottom line, and this is where Israel enters the picture. The decision to wait on
holding an Arab League summit did not come from pro-Israel motives, heaven forbid, but rather from
internal Arab considerations, which at their bottom line affect Israel directly: by the decision to wait
for the U.N. Security Council to make a decision, and only afterwards decide how to act, most of the
Arab countries are now sitting on the fence, giving Israel time, and waiting to see how Israel will act.

If the ground attack creates an outcry, and Hamas cries out for help, it is reasonable to assume that we
will hear harsh overtones against the Hamas movement from the “moderate” camp, and a silent
agreement with Israel’s demands. After all, not Egypt, not Saudi Arabia, and certainly not Jordan, have
much sympathy for the Hamas movement or its mother – the Muslim Brotherhood, which calls out
against these regimes and kingdoms.

But if the accepted impression becomes that Hamas was able to stand its ground and register some
achievements, just as in the Second Lebanon War; if the result is “gray” and not clear, in black and
white, then the Arab regimes will have to explain to their masses why they did not act towards helping
the besieged Palestinians in Gaza. And it would be reasonable to assume that we would see much more
activity and much harsher overtones regarding Israel.

The bottom line comes back to us. The Arab countries are eagerly waiting for reports from the field
over the next few days. A clear cut result in favor of Israel could entrench these camps even further,
deepen the divide, and maybe even have positive results for Israel. A vague, unclear, and unequivocal
result, which Hamas would be able to count as an achievement, could change the picture in the other
direction.

After all, this is not a matter of an actual divorce that has no turning back, since even the heads of
Hamas, especially Ismail Haniya [the head of Hamas regime in Gaza] and Khaled Mashal [leader of the
political Hamas branch, based in Damascus], made sure to add appeasing messages towards Cairo in their
public speeches (“we have no conflict with anyone in the Arab world, only with the occupation”). And so
everyone will wait for developments and Al Jazeera’s pictures. These will affect our reality very much in
the near future.

Two closing comments: although on the public, stated level it seems that the “radicals” are on top, the
experience of recent times tells us that in the end, when decisions come to the deciding bodies, the
“moderates” come out on top. We saw evidence of this in Egypt’s political achievements during the Arab
League Foreign Ministers conference this week. The other issue, which few people paid attention to, was
the “Arab Peace Initiative.” Although there were demands to withdraw the initiative by different
bodies, including by the ruler of Libya, Muammar al-Gaddafi, it remains. The Saudis even claimed that
“withdrawing it would be like a present for Israel”. But, as stated above, all of this will be affected by
the result of the Israeli actions in Gaza.