"THE Arabs have lost patience with Israel", said Mr Afif Safieh, the Palestinian ambassador to London, in angry response to Israel's deployment of bulldozers on the pine wooded hill Palestinians call Jabal Abu Ghaeim and Israelis Har Homa, south east of Jerusalem.
As a result of this action, relations between the Arab governments and Israel have been hard frozen before they could thaw in the warm spring precipitated by the signing of the First Oslo Accord on the White House lawn on September 13th, 1993.
The handshake broadcast round the world between the Palestine Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, and the late Israeli prime minister, Mr Yitzak Rabin, gave rise to great expectations among Arabs everywhere.
There were expectations that a Palestinian state would emerge after half a century of war and violence and that Israel would come to honourable terms with Syria and Lebanon. There were hopes of a comprehensive peace and an end to the arms race which beggars the region.
But these expectations have been whittled down by the never ending bickering over implementation of the agreements, by the failure of Israel to pull out of most of the West Bank and Gaza and by the expansion of Israeli settlements.
The construction of an entirely "new" settlement at Jabal Abu Ghneim/Har Homa was the unkindest cut of all, because the Israelis state openly that this development is meant to predetermine the status of Jerusalem before "final status" negotiations with the Palestinians even begin.
For Palestinians and Arabs, the sharing of the holy city of Muslims and Christians and Jews is as essential to a comprehensive settlement as is Palestinian and Arab recognition of Israel's exclusive sovereignty for Israelis.
If the Oslo Accord had left the Arabs without hope of sovereignty in the eastern sector of the city the accord would not have been signed. By asserting Israel's sovereignty, by building this new settlement, the Natanyahu government has tried to dash this hope. But in so doing it has dashed Israel's own hope of good relations with its neighbours.
One Palestinian commentator remarked: "When we signed the Oslo agreement we opened doors for Israel from Morocco to Muscat and now, from Muscat to Morocco, those doors are now slamming shut." And the Arabs are not likely to extend their hospitality again until there is concrete progress on the ground in the occupied Palestinian territories.
This is because the all important element of "trust has been lost", to quote the Egyptian Foreign Minister, Mr Amr Musa. Such trust as there was always very limited in any case. It existed only in the minds of the Arab rulers who made peace with the Jewish state. The vast majority of Arabs never trusted either the agreements made by their rulers or Israel's intentions.
This is why relations between Israel and the Arabs never prospered on the people to people plane and why the peace between Egypt and Israel, reached as long ago as 1979, remains "cold". And the peace between Jordan and Israel, which King Hussein tried very hard to develop into a warm" peace, has never warmed up.
Indeed, a senior Jordanian political figure told The Irish Times yesterday that "relations between Jordan and Israel have now reached the same level as relations between Egypt and Israel - non belligerency. Peace as defined by an absence of war, nothing more."
The Egyptian President, Mr Hosni Mubarak, said the building of Har Homa could start a new era of violence". Although Mr Mubarak did not define the "violence" he predicted, Arab rulers can expect most of the popular anger over the failure of the peace process and the violence produced by this anger to be directed against them, as has happened in the past.
Endeavouring to divert popular anger and focus attention on a new attempt to "internationalise" the crisis over Jerusalem, the Arabs rulers have called an emergency meeting of the Jerusalem committee of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference for March 27th.
But this 53 member organisation can do nothing more than condemn Israel's actions. Its very powerlessness can only exacerbate the alienation many Arabs feel from their rulers and the international groupings which have failed to stop Israel from going ahead with its construction project.
THE popular mood in the Arab world has been demonstrated this week by two small significant developments involving the Jordanian soldier who murdered seven Israeli schoolgirls on the frontier on March 13th.
First, the Jordanian Bar Association, which undertook to defend the soldier, was swamped by lawyers offering their services. And yesterday a businessman from far distant Kuwait pledged $10,000 in financial assistance to the family of the soldier, whose pay has been stopped.
The feeling in the Arab world, right or wrong, is that Mr Natanyahu was personally responsible for the deaths of the schoolgirls because of rising tension produced by his hardline policies.
The palace in Amman tried and failed to counter this feeling, initially by denying the soldier had a political motive, a notion which was rejected by the people, and then by setting up a scapegoat for the security failure which led to the shooting.
Yesterday the Prime Minister Mr Abdel Karim Kabariti, was fired But in his place the palace named the man who negotiated and signed the deeply unpopular peace treaty between Jordan and Israel, Mr Abdel Salam Majali, so the wide gulf between palace and people is expected to grow.
The Palestinians, and the Arabs, are now caught between a rock and a hard place. Mr Arafat has said that as long as the bulldozers work on Har Homa he cannot negotiate. In the absence of negotiations the region - could drift towards war, if the Syrian assessment of the situation is correct. But unable to wage peace on Israel's terms, the Arabs cannot wage war against an all powerful Israel. Therefore, the Middle East could return to square one, to the situation of no war no peace, with occasional bouts of violence, that obtained before the breakthrough achieved by the Oslo Accord.
