Following their summit meeting in Cairo, King Hussein of Jordan, Mr Yasser Arafat, the President of the Palestinian Authority, and the Egyptian President, Mr Hosni Mubarak, stated that comprehensive Middle East peace depended on a "fair" settlement, recognising the religious claims of Muslims, Christians and Jews and the political demands of both Palestinians and Israelis.
King Hussein also said he would support East Jerusalem becoming the capital of a Palestinian state, a direct challenge to Israel which insists the city is its exclusive capital.
The three met at a time when their separate peace deals with Israel have been bitterly criticised because of Israel's "Grapes of Wrath" offensive in Lebanon.
So angry was Arab popular reaction that the king was compelled to cancel a visit to Washington where he was due to meet with President Clinton, and the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Shimon Peres. Egypt, a current member of the Security Council, was obliged to sponsor an Arab resolution condemning Israel's attack on Lebanon.
The Cairo summit took place in an atmosphere further poisoned by the revelation published in the Israeli weekly Kol Ha'ir on Friday (and widely disseminated in the Arab press) that the five Israeli gunners who fired on the UN base at Qana on April 18th had no regrets over the shelling because the 101 civilians killed had been "just a bunch of Arabs" whose deaths did not matter because there were "millions of them".
These clearly racist remarks emerged as Lebanon and Egypt abandoned the attempt to secure a Security Council vote condemning Israel for the Qana massacre.
This was blocked by the US, adding diplomatic insult to the injury inflicted on the Arab body politic by Israel's flagrant use of US made armaments in its onslaught on Lebanon.
So close has the identification of the US been with Israel that political commentators in Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian territories have written of the "Grapes of Wrath" offensive as a "joint effort".
Mr Rami George Khouri, the leading columnist for the Jordan Times, summed up Arab anger when he said, "Israel and the United States are our friends and partners, yet they are also the killers of our brothers and sisters in Lebanon ... Arab governments need to take more than symbolic or rhetorical action in such a situation, but their scope for manoeuvre is constrained by the overriding strategic need to promote closer relationships with Israel and the United States."
