BEIRUT -- Arab summits may deal with any matter of common concern to the 22 member states of the "Arab Nation." The matter may be "ordinary" or "emergency," but in practice the more or less permanent emergency of Palestine has furnished 90 percent of their resolutions. Only occasionally have other issues taken precedence, for example, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.

When the kings and presidents convene here this week, two issues, Palestine and Iraq, will confront them. Each is a grave one in its own right; together, they achieve an altogether higher level of malignancy. The combination was already menacing at their last gathering, in Amman last year. With the intifada close to spilling over into the region as a whole and with the United States setting up Hussein as the next major target of its "war on terror," they are more explosive and more interdependent than ever.

Serious doubts arose over whether this 14th summit would ever convene. Conceived as exercises of strength-through-unity, such conferences have in practice been more like periodic yardsticks 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 newborn Jewish state came out of the first Arab-Israeli war much larger than the United Nations had envisaged, and turned most Palestinians into refugees.

That has been pretty much the story, if less dramatically, ever since. Summits were always reactive, some improvised a response to some new Israeli challenge or fait accompli. They reflected an ever-deteriorating balance of power. Their reduced goals reflected that -- only to suffer yet new defeats and setbacks.

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

Day in and day out, satellite television beamed the Israeli-Palestinian war into every Arab home. The Arab rulers resisted all popular appeals to support their Palestinian brethren, terrified apparently of anything that risked developing into a confrontation with Israel, its U.S. backer or, most seriously perhaps, with their own people, for whom inaction on Palestine was but the most conspicuous and universal of many discontents.

The candid foreign minister of diminutive Qatar caused a stir when he said "begging" the U.S. to intercede was all that was left for much greater states.

Still, the summit is taking place, and it could be a very important one. Certainly it is to be the most scrutinized ever, with 2,000 journalists in attendance. Although Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat -- if Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon releases him from his Ramallah confinement -- will be the star, Saudi Arabia will be the linchpin. Crown Prince Abdullah has taken the lead in two zones of crisis, with his peace initiative under which the whole Arab world will offer Israel full "normalization" in return for full withdrawal from the occupied territories, and with his opposition to any U.S. campaign to bring down Hussein by force, or use Saudi territory for the purpose.

The summit -- an extravaganza in which attending "majesties and their excellencies" plus thousands of retainers will close down Beirut airport with their private aircraft -- is in itself a flagrant symptom of the Arab condition, of the gulf between the rulers and the ordinary man, who was always politically disenfranchised but is now, in addition, increasingly indigent, unemployed and futureless in the midst of enormous wealth.

Historically, the peace plan, however much of an achievement, amounts to yet another Arab retreat of the kind that earlier summits have endorsed. Leaving vague or unmentioned such crucial issues as the Palestinian refugees' "right of return," it goes further than any of its predecessors. That is why it has incurred reservations from countries like Syria.

Nonetheless, it has earned an unusual degree of Arab support. For the kings and presidents know that the more convincing this pan-Arab offer is, the better the chance of escaping a broader conflict, which 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 brought Sharon to a crossroads: Either he renounces his policy of brute force and engages in peace-seeking diplomacy that offers serious prospect of complete withdrawal from the occupied territories, or he escalates in radically new ways.

Who knows where those could lead? Last week, on Israeli television, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak saw fit to warn the Israelis not even to think of the "transfer," or mass expulsion, of Palestinians that, according to the latest poll, 46 percent of them would like to see.

It is true that the Arab "street" is strangely quiescent. No less true, however, is that Arab officialdom lives in continuous fear of an eruption of anger that would be directed as much against itself as Israel, of some independent, popular movement, or deed, that would force them to step into the fray.

It is from traditionally unruly, multiconfessional Lebanon that the "popular" will could make itself most devastatingly felt. There, Hezbollah has of late been growing increasingly strident about its "duty" to support the Palestinians and its belief that Israel is now destructible.

Hezbollah has publicly admitted a bid to smuggle Katyusha rockets into the West Bank via Jordan. Then, two weeks ago, two unidentified assailants killed six Israelis 2 km from the Lebanese frontier. Initially unsure, the Israelis -- having found a specially constructed ladder by which the assailants supposedly crossed the border fence -- laid the blame squarely on Hezbollah.

If Hezbollah, an organization renowned for its craft and calculation, did do it, it was a most ominous provocation, a qualitative jump from mere resistance to 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 own, clearly enunciated security doctrine, but to strike back, against Lebanon and Syria, with devastating force.

"I think the Israelis have been so abnormally quiet about it because they know just how grave a situation they could be getting into," said an official with the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon.

The Israelis, including Sharon, do not want such an "Arabization" -- or, historically speaking, a re-Arabization -- of the struggle. But as long as Sharon is in charge they greatly risk getting one. That is why a full-scale Arab adoption of Crown Prince Abdullah's initiative would furnish Israelis who grasp the perils to which Sharon exposes them with an incentive to drive him from power.

Now add U.S. designs on Iraq to the summiteers' predicament. It is not that most regimes would be averse to seeing Hussein go, if the business of removing him could be swift, surgical and guaranteed to succeed. They know that for wider Arab as well as strictly Iraqi, reasons it cannot succeed. Even without the Palestinian drama, the conditions in which the U.S. is apparently preparing to go about it would be bad enough, but with Palestine and the unprecedented indulgence that the Bush administration has heaped on Israel, the regimes fear the the outcome would be catastrophic and just as liable to bring their own overthrow. That is why the Arab leaders have reached an even greater eve-of-summit consensus on Iraq than on Palestine.

King Abdullah of Jordan has joined his Saudi namesake in telling America that "the Middle East cannot support two wars at once." Even the Kuwaitis, with the most reason to fear and hate Hussein, oppose a U.S. adventure.

It is not clear what impression this consensus has made on the Bush administration. The whiff of a trade-off hung about U.S. Vice President Richard Cheney's latest tour of the region: Hussein's head in return for Sharon's. Though he and other administration hardliners ostentatiously repudiate "linkage" between Iraq and Palestine, in practice they have implicitly acknowledged one. With troubleshooter Anthony Zinni, the U.S. has re-engaged in the Israeli-Palestinian arena in a somewhat less biased fashion than before, having exhibited impatience with Sharon's excesses.

Yet even if the Arabs accept this trade-off in principle -- and there is little sign that they do -- the U.S. 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 it undoubtedly is, the consensus of weakness and desperation. If so, Sharon is liable in due course to resume his rampage, and Bush to press against Hussein.

In that case, Arab commentators say, the shock to the existing Arab order would be so great that, if there ever is another summit, at least some of the Arab leaders who came to Beirut may no longer be in power to attend it.