A double-edged sword:

...The summit had succeeded in institutionalizing the Intifadah,with some heads of state calling it a "new Arab-Israeli War...

...Initially Arafat had to struggle to assert his centrality to the uprising and show that the dog was wagging the tail...

...Union" not "occupation " was the correct word during the pre-1967 period, said the wounded Hashemite...

...Even so, for most West Bankers, memories of the "union" with Jordan are not quite so misty-eyed...

...He appealed to the Arabs for funds and reminded the ungrateful West Bank Palestinians that Jordan was still paying the salaries of eighteen thousands workers and maintaining various ministries in the Occupied Zone...

...Since he didn't stand up when he read his speech, nobody checked to see if he was keeping his fingers crossed...

...My Algerian cab driver went so far as to say "the French never treated us as badly as the Israelis are treating the Palestinians...

...But Hussein did not come out and say that he had a Palestinian problem of his own...

...Brother Muammar, as Hassan referred to his Libyan archrival, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, was also a good show in his flowing white robes, high-heeled white boots, and a single white glove on his right hand so that if he had to shake hands with other Arab heads of state, he wouldn't be contaminated by any "lackeys of imperialism...

...But times change...

...In the end, the king got quite a bit of sympathy...

...Qaddafi meant Hassan in particular, whom he has never forgiven for meeting with former Israeli Prime Minister Simon Peres in 1986...

...Instead the Arab states pledged $ 118 million annually...

...If Qaddafi won best costume, then Hussein certainly won best dramatic monologue...

...In David Grossman's The Yellow Wind, Ramallah lawyer Raja Shehadeh recalls how West Bank residents were forced to line the route of the king's motorcade to his summer palace, sometimes standing in the hot sun for hours...

...The successful Iraqi offensive on the Fao Peninsula in April and the apparent waning of Ayatollah Khomeini's health have diminished the Persian menace...

...He conjured up the danger in the specter of Israel's right-wing, which has plans, said the king, for a "transfer," a term that has come to mean the forced deportation of West Bank Arabs to the East Bank...

...Hussein called U.S...

...now > the Arab elites had transformed it from a Palestinian into an Arab revolt...

...But somehow, he still didn't look happy...

...The Arab Summit in Algiers, then, was a command performance by the haves, Arab heads of state, who turned up to bow to the stone-throwers of the West Bank and Gaza who have taken their fate into their own hands and captivated the imagination of the Arab man in the street for whom the Palestinian cause still has great emotional resonance...

...A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD THE WEST BANK COMES HOME The Arab Summit in Algeria had a spectacular opening on June 7. Just a few hours before the first session, Morocco's King Hassan made a majestic entrance, sailing into the Port of Algiers aboard his own ocean liner...

...It was a public relations gambit aimed at showing Arab subjects that their rulers were standing on the right side of the barricades...

...The king forgot to mention that...

...Nor was the PLO permitted to claim the uprising as its own...

...It destabilized Jordan in 1970 and plunged Lebanon into civil war six years later...

...The same images, seen on television sets in every Arab country, have been a double-edged sword for the presidents, kings, and emirs who constitute the established Arab order...

...Only Jordan's King Hussein still seemed sulky...

...Algerian President Chadli Benejedid kept a dour expression throughout...

...Arafat had asked for a fund of $1 million a day to pay for food, medical care, and striking workers' salaries in the West Bank and Gaza...

...The atmosphere reeked of damage control as the summiteers paid lip service to the cause, and promised that their checks were in the mail...

...But the pictures of exhilarated young civilians battling a well-armed, well-trained army also carry a darker message to the Arab masses...

...There is, of course, Arab pride in erasing twenty years of Palestinian Arab docility under Israeli occupation...

...Everybody said it was some speech...

...It is a message of insurrection from the have-nots: even against long odds it is possible to shake up the system and stake a claim...

...He reminded the shibab (young men) that in 1950, Jordanian and Palestinian delegates held conventions in Amman and Jerusalem where they voted for the West Bank's inclusion into the Kingdom of Jordan, opting against creating an independent Palestinian state...

...There was a stifled undercurrent of hysteria in Hussein's subtext in which he admitted that the Intifadah had placed the West Bank out of his reach and went on to say that the flames could spread to the East Bank too if things went on unchecked...

...It was the summit's high point...

...Tens of thousands of cheering Algerians turned out to give a tumultuous welcome to North Africa's only ruling monarch, proving that even in austere, revolutionary Algeria, people still know style when they see it...

...Instead, he was forced to continue a sharing arrangement with Jordan's King Hussein...

...Why would Hussein want to add another million West Bank Palestinians...

...But I believe him...

...But by the end, the fix was in and Arafat changed his tune, declaring the summit a "great victory...

...only practiced "crisis management" when Israel's interests were at risk...

...Instead, he swore up and down that he didn't crave even one inch of West Bank territory...

...Between speeches, closed circuit TV monitors showed endless reruns of scenes from the Intifadah, the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories: Israeli soldiers clubbing and shooting, Palestinian youths throwing stones and flashing the victory sign...

...Having ridden the coattails of the Intifadah back to the center of the Arab stage, Arafat wanted "sole and legitimate" control over the purse strings of the $118-million fund...

...In fact, a million-and-a-half Algerians died in the war of independence...

...Even the Iran-Iraq War, cause celebre of the last Arab summit in Amman, was mentioned only perfunctorily...

...policy in the region Israel's policy, and said the U.S...

...In a thirty-two-page speech, remarkable for its bitterness and defensiveness, the king offered a revealing look at how low his relations with the Palestinians of the West Bank have sunk...

...TERENCE WRONG...

...This was Qaddafi's first Arab summit in a decade...

...The major theme of the Algiers pow-wow was inescapable...

...And exposure not just to Israel's army but also to the ways of its democracy have helped evolve the fierce nationalism that has taken root in the West Bank and Gaza...

...It was, in fact, less than he had hoped for...

...Sixty percent of Jordan's population is already Palestinian...

...By the end, for the first time ever, North Africa's five leaders managed to sit together in order to discuss unifying the Maghreb as an economic bloc...

...Palestinian nationalism has been a radical force in Arab politics...

...Everyone claimed to be happy with the outcome...

...He also got control over part of the newly allocated fund...

...But Maghrebi concerns were only a sideshow, as were the questions of Egypt's readmission to the Arab League and the latest violence in Lebanon...

...His arrival in the capital marked the restoration of Moroccan-Algerian relations, which he had broken off in 1976...

...The meeting had begun with Arafat's senior aide and PLO spokesman, Bassam Abu Sharif, charging that' 'Arab officialdom was guilty of dereliction of duty toward the Palestinian uprising in the occupied land...

...He began by reprimanding West Bank youth, who made the Intifadah, for their faulty history, accusing them of mimicking "the Israeli line" that Jordan's rule over the West Bank from 1948 to 1967 was just as much of an occupation as Israel's rule has been since...