MEETINGS, meetings and more meetings. It's been all go for Arab leaders since the Israeli elections. First Presidents Hafez Assad (Syria) and Mubarak (Egypt) held one on one crisis talks about the victory of Israeli right winger, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu.
Then Jordan's King Hussein called a three way talk with the Egyptian president and Yasser Arafat. After that came this weekend's Damascus trip, with Assad hosting Mubarak again, this time with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. And now Mubarak is organising an Arab summit no less, assembling at least a dozen Arab leaders, in Cairo from June 21st to 23rd, for a bout of hand wringing over Mr Netanyahu's victory.
The cause of this Arab interaction, of course, is the common worry over where Mr Netanyahu will take the peace process. Although he has yet to be sworn formally into office, he has already made clear he will vehemently oppose Palestinian statehood. He says the notion of a land for peace deal with Syria, involving Israel relinquishing the Golan Heights, is out.
In response, Syrian and Palestinian officials have called his policies tantamount to "a declaration of war", and even the more moderate statements emanating from Saturday's Assad Mubarak Abdullah parley warned of "a fresh cycle of violence" if peace talks ran aground.
Privately, neither King Hussein nor President Mubarak is particularly upset by the change in Israeli government. They both have their peace treaties signed, sealed and functioning. The king and Mr Netanyahu have even developed something of a personal friendship.
Mr Arafat, by contrast, was devastated by the defeat of Shimon Peres, the strongest advocate of the Israeli PLO accords. He must wait and hope that tough talking prime ministerial candidate Netanyahu is transformed into pragmatic prime minister Netanyahu.
The man who appears most shocked by the ascent of the Israeli right, however, is the man who could most easily have prevented it: President Assad. While Mr Arafat realised Mr Peres's campaign was in trouble and did everything to boost him - sitting heavily on Hamas to ensure no pre election bombs, annulling the PLO Covenant, toning down his rhetoric Assad did nothing to save the most moderate, flexible Israeli government he could have wished to see controlling the Knesset.
When first Yitzhak Rabin and then Mr Peres indicated a willingness to return the Golan Heights in exchange for a peace deal, President Assad muttered barely a word of encouragement. Beyond despatching his foreign minister to give an unsuccessful interview to Israel television, he resolutely rejected all Israeli, and American, efforts to find a deal.
Most significantly in terms of Israeli public opinion, he refused to meet Israeli leaders or to pay the kind of deadlock busting visit to Jerusalem with which Egypt's Anwar Sad at paved the way to Israeli Egyptian peace in the late 1970s.
Mr Peres lost the May 29th elections by fewer than 30,000 votes. As new clouds of uncertainty again envelope the Golan, Mr Assad might ask himself how many Israeli sceptics he could have won over simply by agreeing to shake Mr Peres by the hand.