Visiting Beirut at the end of July, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and President Assad of Syria expanded their 'mini summit' with Lebanese President Michel Suleiman to include the Lebanese Prime Minister, Saad Hariri, the (Shi'i) Speaker of the Lebanese parliament, Nabih Berri, the Lebanese and Syrian Foreign Ministers, the head of Saudi intelligence and Assad's political adviser, Bouthaina Sha'ban, but why were they in Lebanon in the first place? If the semi-official answer, to 'heal' Arab divisions was the correct one, then which were the particular divisions they hoped to heal during this short visit?

The rapprochement between Syria and Saudi Arabia, traditionally polar opposites on the Arab political spectrum, culminated in the exchange of ambassadors last year. Assad has a strategic relationship with Hizbullah and Abdullah a close personal relationship with Saad Hariri, so they were both well placed to appeal for calm in Lebanon, following reports that the special UN prosecutor investigating the assassination of Rafiq Hariri in 2005 intends to name past or present Hizbullah members. In his major address on August 9, which can be seen as a riposte to these accusations, Hasan Nasrallah presented circumstantial evidence implicating Israel in the assassination. He began with the confession of an Israeli spy inside Hizbullah, showing that as far back as the 1990s Israel had been trying to convince Hariri that Hizbullah was planning to assassinate him. According to the plan Nasrallah outlined, Hariri's sister would have been assassinated first, followed by the assassination of Hariri himself when he went to Sidon to pay his condolences. The bulk of the material involving Israel, however, centred on Hizbullah's interception of surveillance film taken by Israeli drones before the assassination. They showed that Israel had been monitoring the movement of Hariri's motorcade in West Beirut as he passed from his homes to the parliament and the coastal road, where he was assassinated on February 14, 2005. According to Nasrallah, an Israeli AWACS electronic surveillance aircraft and a warplane flew over Beirut on the same day. Confessions of spies arrested recently show that Israel has also been gathering information on President Suleiman's house and a yacht belonging to the chief of staff of the Lebanese army, General Jean Qahwaji. It had also been monitoring the movements of key figures in the March 14 movement, including Prime Minister Hariri and Samir Geagea.

None of Nasrallah's evidence was in any way conclusive. After all, Israeli planes - drones and warplanes - fly over Lebanon every other day but it was certainly suggestive and it does underline the refusal of the UN investigation from the beginning to canvass all possible suspects in the Hariri assassination. These would have included Israel and the US, both of which have a long record of assassination and sabotage inside Lebanon. Detlev Mehlis, however, the first prosecutor appointed to investigate the Hariri killing, went straight for Syria. The 'pro Syrian' Lebanese president at the time was under pressure, Bashar al Assad had quarreled with Hariri, Syria had intelligence agents everywhere in Lebanon (as if the US and Israel did not) and therefore must have known about the assassination plan. As it must have known about the assassination, probably it was responsible, so the special prosecutor's inferential line ran. His logic was all over the place but his accusations were the lever used to force the withdrawal of remaining Syrian troops from Lebanon in what was a strategic triumph for Israel and the US and a public relations disaster for Syria. Four 'pro Syrian' generals were arrested in 2005 and held in Lebanese custody. This road came to a dead end in April last year when they were transferred to the custody of the UN inquiry. Within hours the chief prosecutor, by now Daniel Bellamare, ruled that they shoud be released immediately for lack of evidence. Until the recent reports that he was getting ready to name members of Hizbullah, the inquiry seemed to have come to a dead end insofar as prosecutable material was concerned.

On the question of cui bono, it did not make sense from the beginning that Syria would have assassinated Hariri. The Syrian government would have been well aware of the consequences even if it had contemplated the act. The only beneficiaries from the assassination were Israel and the United States, who orchestrated the campaign to get Syrian troops out of Lebanon on a towering wave of Lebanese rage. It must be remembered that the Israel Prime Minister at the time was Ariel Sharon, the most crudely brutal political figure ever to stride the Israeli political scene, a man whose life was characterised by massacre and murder. Neither does it make sense that Syria, having apparently assassinated Hariri, would continue to dig itself into an even deeper hole through the assassination of other leading 'anti Syrian' political and media figures. Again, the only beneficiaries of these crimes were the US and Israel and Maronite ultras who may or may not have worked with them if indeed they were involved.

The ciurcumstantial evidence Nasrallah presented on August 9 was the fruit of a year's work by a team of Hizbullah's own investigators. Given the fact that about 150 Israeli agents have been arrested in Lebanon in the past three or four years, more disclosures are likely. Israel's spy network in Lebanon seems to have been comprehensively broken. Its arrested agents included car dealers who planted electronic tracking devices in cars, army officers and highly placed heads of technical departments in the country's two main telecommunications companies (Alfa and Ogero). The latest high profile arrest was of Fayez Karam, a former military officer who was a senior figure in Michel Aoun's Free Patriotic Movement which, of course, is Hizbullah's chief Christian ally inside Lebanon. The interrogation of the Alfa and Ogero officials makes it clear that Israel had totally penetrated Lebanon's electronic communications network long before the Hariri assassination, giving it the capacity to clone sim cards and make false phone calls in the name of genuine subscribers. It may be remembered that a string of mobile phone calls were central to the accusations made by Detlev Mehlis against the 'pro Syrian' officials close to the 'pro Syrian' Lebanese president.

Saad Hariri himself remains the grieving son but whether for pragmatic reasons, since becoming Prime Minister, or because he is no longer convinced that Syria killed his father, he has developed a strong working relationship with Syria. Both he and President Suleiman have called on all Lebanese to stand firm against the Israeli enemy. Hariri has been to Damascus twice since being elected president in while Assad's visit to Beirut is his first as Syria's president. Israel now identifies Lebanon and not just Hizbullah as its enemy on the northern front and has threatened to apply the 'Dahiyeh strategy' (Dahiyeh being the Shi'a and largely Hizbullah suburb of Beirut subjected to intense bombardment in 2006) to the whole country in the event of another war which, it has to be said, most Lebanese see coming sooner or later. Israel violates Lebanese air space and territorial waters at will so peace depends on Lebanese restraint in the face of Israeli provocation. In early August Israel tried to cut down a tree across the armistice line, triggering off an exchange of artillery fire (Israeli) and sniper fire (Lebanese army) in which three Lebanese soldiers and one civilian and one Israeli officer were killed. Israel was clearly acting in breach of the armistice regime yet it was Lebanon which the US punished, by suspending military aid. It was a further small sign of how things have changed that the Lebanese Defence Minister, Elias Murr, said that if US aid was conditional, and could not be used in the country's defence, then Lebanon did not want it.

'Healing' Arab divisions is a task that would would take divisions of arbitrators itself. Just before President Assad and King Abdullah arrived in Beirut, Husni Mubarak held separate meetings with King Abdullah of Jordan and Mahmud Abbas, the head of the rump Palestinian government in Ramallah. The object was to push Abbas into resuming direct talks with Israel. Abbas is also under pressure from the US to do what he is told but even for Abbas' own Fatah members the charade has gone on too long. Ahmad Qurei, the Palestinian architect of the failed 'peace process', said recently that 19 years of talks with Israel had achieved nothing. In fact, if the talks had achieved nothing the Palestinians would be far better off than they are now. Israel has used the last two decades to expand settlements and consolidate its hold on East Jerusalem. Barack Obama put up a show of getting tough with Israel but fell at the first hurdle when Netanyahu said Israel would do what it wanted in East Jerusalem and would cease settlement-building and expansion only for a limited time. As much as ever, Israel's agenda is now the US agenda.

Every single one of these questions is linked. Even the campaign against Iran is Israeli-driven. The US would be able to deal with Iran were it not for Israel and Iran's support for those who have been its victims. The Iranian regime does some terrible things to its own people but so do many other regimes with which the US has a close relationship. Iran is a religious state, has a market economy and welcomes foreign investment on the most favorable terms, all of which would normally make it an attractive partner for the US. In its 31 years of existence it has never attacked anoher country. It does not have nuclear weapons and there is no evidence either that it is developing them or that it wants to develop them despite continuing suggestions to the contrary by Israel and its spruikers in the United States. Indeed, the nuclear question has the smell of a red herring. The real issue seems to be Iran's growing regional influence and its support for governments and organisations that stand in the way of Israel's drive for hegemonic domination of the Middle East, but Iran cannot credibly be attacked just for this reason any more than Iraq could be shattered without the pretext of 'weapons of mass destruction'. Hence Iran's supposed drive for nuclear weapons and the threats to 'wipe Israel off the map' (not exactly what Ayatullah Khumaini or President Ahmedinejad said, quoting the ayatullah, but the phrase the mainstream media still prefers to use).

Ultimately there is one reason why Israel has attacked Arab countries so many times in the past six decades; why it is threatening Lebanon with a repeat of the 'Dahiyeh strategy'; why it attacked a Turkish aid flotilla sailing to Gaza; why, in large part, at the urging of Israel and its Jewish neoconservative champions in the US, Iraq had to be destroyed as a unified country; and why Iran is now being threatened with military attack aimed not just at its nuclear installations but at its capacity to defend itself and maybe even to survive as a functioning state. That reason is the determination to turn Palestine into Israel. The 'zionist dream' has not yet been fulfilled. There is still the possibility of many slips between the cup and the lip and hence the apocalyptic rhetoric directed against anyone who gets in Israel's way. The conflation of all these issues, metastasizing from a single source, is bringing the Middle East to the verge of a collision of incaculable consequences. Fidel Castro, presumably well informed by Cuban intelligence, has talked twice in recent months of the possibility of a nuclear war in the region. He at least is thinking about the unthinkable.