Ryan Bohl
Founded in 1945, the Arab League has always aimed for pan-national aspirations, regional coordination, and peace. However, crisis after crisis has seen it act more as a bystander and trend follower rather than a regional leader. There's little on the horizon to suggest that the League is ready to break out of this historical paradigm.
A case in point is the recent Manama Summit, where Arab League members agreed on a proposal to call for United Nations peacekeepers in the Palestinian Territories as a step toward establishing a Palestinian state. This proposal has little chance of having an actual impact on the ground. Israel remains highly skeptical of the U.N.'s role in the Palestinian territories due to controversies with UNRWA and the U.N.'s inability to prevent Hezbollah from militarizing the Lebanese-Israeli border. Thus this represents a status quo approach: offering a proposal with little chance of implementation, while at the same time refraining from demanding members use what leverage they do have over Israel—economic and diplomatic—to make the proposal more likely to be enacted.
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