Arab Summit: Poles Apart

IT was 24 years ago that Egypt's King Farouk assembled royalty and high officials from six other countries at his luxurious country estate at Inshass for the first Arab summit on the Palestinian problem. That conclave broke up after agreeing on some high-sounding platitudes, most of its principals were subsequently assassinated or forced out of office. The discouraging precedent of that initial summit has been echoed virtually every time Arab leaders have gathered to wrestle with the Palestinian problem. The meeting called in Cairo last week by Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser was no better--and perhaps worse. The savage civil strife in Jordan polarized Arab leaders as never before. Not once, in fact, were delegates from all of the ten Arab states represented in Cairo able to sit down together, underscoring the Arabs' difficulty in papering over their disagreements and presenting even a facade of unity.

Three Arab nations boycotted Nasser's summit outright: Morocco, Algeria and Iraq. Morocco's King Hassan probably stayed away simply to avoid entanglement in a faraway fight. The other two did so out of sympathy with the guerrillas. Libya's youthful new strongman, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who has remained outwardly loyal to Nasser, attended the conference--but only after siding strongly with the Palestinians and offering to send Libyan troops into the fight on the commandos' side. Nothing ever came of that, but there is speculation that Gaddafi, who came to power last year as an unblushing admirer of Nasser, may be on the verge of an open break with his onetime idol.

The overriding issue separating Arab leaders is how much support to give the Palestinian guerrilla movement. Because of their vow to destroy Israel as a state, the fedayeen have won immense popularity among the masses throughout the Arab world. Almost all Arab governments provide limited support to the guerrillas, and the more radical ones unreservedly endorse their cause. But established leaders are leary of the fedayeen's fanaticism and appalled by some of their tactics, especially airliner shootups and hijackings. Most of all, they see the proselytizing guerrillas as threats to their own regimes, and have hardly been reassured by King Hussein's experience in Jordan.

Sitting Idle. Nasser's most trustworthy allies at the summit were Saudi Arabia's King Feisal, Lebanon's new President, Suleiman Franjieh, and Sudan's strongman, Major General Jaafar Numeiry, who served as mediator between the Cairo conferees and the antagonists in Jordan. It was the goal of Nasser to stop the fighting before either side achieved victory. Nasser still needs as much of a Palestinian "constituency," as one Egyptian official put it, as he can salvage; but he also would like to keep Hussein, his primary link to the West.

Because the bloodshed has reinforced sympathy among many Arabs for the Palestinian cause, Nasser's attempt to satisfy both sides seems almost hopeless. Nonetheless, he is determined to support moderate elements of the fedayeen, hoping they will be able to work out a reconciliation with Hussein.

In the light of the rivalries and lingering enmities among the Arabs, it is hardly surprising Nasser's summit came off no more successfully than Farouk's. Before the conclave got under way, Egypt's Minister of National Guidance, Mohammed Heikal, proclaimed: "This is a meeting of Arab leaders who think that they cannot sit idle in their air-conditioned offices making proclamations about the crisis in Jordan." The group, indeed, was able to engineer a merciful cease-fire in Jordan. But Arab leaders also had plenty of opportunity to sit in their air-conditioned rooms at the Nile Hilton and contemplate their growing differences.

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