Arab leaders, along with most of the world, expect acting premier Ehud Olmert's Kadima party to win Israel's election next week and to maintain a policy of isolating the Palestinians.
Olmert, the political heir to the now-comatose Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, has made it clear that he sees no partner for peace among the Palestinians and will continue Sharon's legacy of unilateral disengagement from the territories.
Arab League Secretary General Amr Mussa, who is preparing for a summit of Arab leaders in Khartoum on Tuesday, the same day as the Israeli vote, says he expects an Olmert government to remain hostile to the Palestinians.
‘Statements by the Kadima party, which will probably win the election, show that there will not be negotiations but only unilateral measures,’ Mussa told Egypt's state-owned Al-Ahram daily newspaper this week.
After the Israelis and Palestinians spent years discussing a peace agreement based on the concept of land for peace, Sharon embarked on a new course. Last year, he unilaterally withdrew Jewish settlers and Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip, setting a precedent for future pullouts in the West Bank.
Olmert has picked up where Sharon left off. Earlier this month, he vowed to set Israel's permanent borders within his prospective four-year term ‘whereby we will be completely separate from the majority of the Palestinian population and preserve a large and stable Jewish majority in Israel’.
Olmert has said he will not wait forever to see if Hamas, whose government is to be sworn in after the summit following its January Palestinian election win, recognizes Israel, renounces violence and accepts previous agreements.
If not, he has pledged to take action with as wide an Israeli and international consensus as possible.
King Abdullah II of Jordan, the only Arab country along with Egypt to have signed a peace treaty with Israel, said the attitude of Hamas will be critical.
‘We are waiting to learn whether Hamas will renounce arms and become a fully political organization,’ he told France's Le Monde daily this week.
‘Optimism will be the word if Hamas commits itself in the political sphere and a moderate Israeli government that wants to make peace is formed.’
Mussa is pessimistic.
‘We need to be aware that Israel will undertake unilateral measures, which further its own interests, and which are opposed to the interests of the Palestinians and to the creation of a Palestinian state.
But ‘if the Israeli government were to propose withdrawal and to deal with the question of Jerusalem and refugees through negotiations, we would not be opposed to a peace initiative.’
Olmert has said he envisages that Israel's permanent borders will take in the ‘Jerusalem envelope’.
But the Palestinians want to make east Jerusalem the capital of their promised future state and strongly oppose large chunks of the occupied West Bank being kept by Israel.
For Emad Gad, a prominent Egyptian specialist on Israel, the fact that Hamas has not secured a broad coalition government and has not recognized the Jewish state or renounced armed struggle, gives Olmert just what he wants.
The situation ‘poses a problem and gives substance to those Israelis who claim there are no credible partners for peace,’ he said.
Both Abdullah and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, another key intermediary in the peace process, will have to forge a new working relationship with Olmert as prime minister -- a man who was Sharon's closest ally in his last government.
Labour party leader Amir Peretz, a Sephardic Jew born in Morocco who is open to Israel-Arab dialogue, met Mubarak in Cairo as recently as last month.
Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the right-wing Likud party which is trailing behind Kadima and Labour, is already well known to the Jordanians and Egyptians having served as Israeli prime minister from 1996 to 1999.