Palestine was almost always the chief raison d'etre of Arab summitry, and, once again, it will top the agenda when 21 heads of states convene in Amman tomorrow. Iraq is on it, too, and although President Saddam Hussein is not going in person, he will cast a baleful and divisive shadow over the proceedings.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the one hand, Iraq and the Gulf on the other, constitute the two great zones of Middle East crisis. "There is a clear and present danger," a former US ambassador to the UN, Richard Holbrooke, said last week, "that the most dangerous situation in the world today - the Middle East - and Iraq could metastasise into a single fireball" and "Saddam's pledge to send thousands of volunteers to fight alongside the Palestinians could create the most serious threat to world peace since the Cuban missile crisis" of 1962.

A shade apocalyptic, perhaps. Never before, however, have the two zones been so malignantly intertwined as they are today. Two things have contributed greatly to this. One is the Palestinians' alAqsa Intifada and the consequent rise to power, in the person of Gen Ariel Sharon, of all that is most intransigent and belligerent in Israeli society. The other is the new Republican administration in Washington and its conviction that Iraq-and-the-Gulf is the more important of the two.

For the Arab leaders, Palestine on its own is headache enough. Six months ago, with the outbreak of the Intifada, Palestine quite suddenly gained that potent centrality in the region's politics that it had appeared to be losing.

Demonstrators took to the streets from the Atlantic to the Gulf; solidarity with the Palestinians was their main theme, but disgust with the incompetence of Arab regimes was a close second. It forced the kings and presidents to hold an emergency summit in Cairo last October.

The only really practical step it took was to establish a $1 billion fund in support of the Intifada. If, at the time, that already fell well below popular expectations, its implementation has invited even greater derision. The Islamic Development Bank says it has delivered $23 million of the $1 billion to the occupied territories; Palestinians put it at a mere $3 million.

Meanwhile, according to the UN, the Palestinian economy has sustained direct losses of $1.15 billion, unemployment has soared to 38 per cent and about a million inhabitants have fallen below the `'poverty line".

"The least libellous thing you can say about this Arab shame," said Beirut's al-Nahar newspaper, "is that Palestine is the victim of Arab lassitude. For otherwise it might be said that some on the Arab side do believe that Sharon's insistence on an end to violence - i.e. the Intifada - is the door to peace."

It is true that the Arab "street", after its initial spasm, has failed to turn on the Arab leaders. But as these meet again, they cannot but be aware that, with the rise of Sharon, the situation has worsened since their last encounter. And they risk being more cruelly judged by their publics than ever.

Enter President Bush. President Clinton made the quest for Middle East peace his overriding ambition; Iraq became a nuisance and diversion from it. Now Bush has reversed these priorities: he, or at least influential figures in his administration, really do want to implement the Iraqi Liberation Act, whereby the US will help the Iraqi opposition bring "representative" government to Iraq. Saddam, not Sharon, is the problem on whom all must "focus and unite".

This suits Sharon - though he wants more. On his visit to the US he sought to promote the notion that Yasser Arafat, far from being the partner for peace that until now the US and Israel considered him, has reverted to his original terrorist self. His natural partner is Saddam. And along with others, Iran, Hizbullah, Hamas, they constitute a threat to Israel, the US and the whole moderate, peace seeking camp in the region.

THE US does not go along with all of that, but it has ceded a substantial amount of what Sharon wants. It agrees there can be "no negotiation under fire", a way of saying that "Palestinian violence" is not a response to occupation, and that "leaders have a responsibility to denounce violence, strip it of its legitimacy", meaning that Arafat condones the attacks on Israelis. Israel-Palestine has now become the nuisance that distracts the US from Iraq, though Arafat, not Sharon, is the prime source of the nuisance.

Privately, and not so privately in the Gulf, many Arab regimes would agree Saddam is a menace, though far less to Israel than to themselves. But, they also contend, nothing nourishes this menace like the Israel-Palestinian conflict and the partisanship which the US displays there.

Nothing else furnishes him with such opportunities for self-aggrandisement, for turning himself, the prime wrecker of Arab and Palestinian causes, into their foremost champion again.

"Yes," a Jordanian politician said, "we know that his propaganda can be stupid, that all his talk of mobilising millions of volunteers is demagoguery, but, in the absence of anyone else even thinking in military terms, he does impress the ordinary man - and, above all, makes all the other leaders look submissive and cowardly.'

So it is that these leaders fall under almost as much pressure to rehabilitate him as they do to support the Intifada. Ironically, the two Arabs states, Egypt and Jordan, which have made peace with Israel, lead the way.

"I think," said the Jordanian politician, "that King Abdullah would love to see Saddam at this conference, to have him fully rehabilitated. Defying America like that would really make him popular."

It is only the opposition of the Gulf states, which still regard Saddam as a greater menace than Sharon, that will keep the summit from bringing him back into the fold.

It is one thing for the US, with help from Arab friends, to impede his rehabilitation. It is quite another to expect them to join it in a campaign to bring him down. Reviving the Gulf war coalition, said the Saudi newspaper al- Watan, "is like trying to sell goods whose sell-by label expired long ago."

THE ONLY thing that might sway the Arab regimes in that direction is a serious pay-off on the Israel-Palestine front; one that casts Sharon, not Arafat, as the real obstacle to peace.

But they won't get that from a new US President who chose to bless the visit of Sharon, once something of an ogre in the US, too, with a reassertion of his determination to move the US embassy to "Israel's capital", Jerusalem.

A train of events may well be under way which the Arab leaders gathering in Amman can do nothing to stop. Saddam is clearly not a man to go quietly. If and when he feels his end is nigh he will take as much of the world with him as possible and, if he has the chemical weapons the Americans believe he has, he will surely use them.

So the harder Sharon smites the Palestinians - and probably, in due course, Hizbullah and the Syrians, too - and the more the Americans besiege and imperil Saddam, the more likely it becomes that the gambler who invaded Iran, and then Kuwait, will escalate from belligerent words to belligerent deeds, and, with Israel-Palestine as his arena, stage the last, great, pre-emptive gamble of his tumultuous career. A Middle East fireball indeed.