THE resolution adopted by Arab League foreign ministers in Cairo on Sunday night, recommending a freeze in Arab relations with Israel, is not binding. Individual states will now decide whether or not to implement it (and Oman has already said it will). Neither does it apply to Egypt and Jordan, which have already signed full peace treaties with Israel.
But there is no mistaking its significance. The move casts Israel, once again, as the Middle East's pariah nation, bringing an abrupt halt to five years of gradually warming relations with countries such as Morocco, Tunisia and the Gulf principalities.
The Arab League call for at least a temporary end to that process of normalisation marks a victory for Syria, which had been pressing for such pan Arab action against Israel almost from the day that the Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, came to power last May.
At first, Egypt and Jordan led concerted opposition to prejudging Mr Netanyahu. Indeed, King Hussein was widely believed to have quietly supported Mr Netanyahu's election bid.
And President Hosni Mubarak told hardline Arab critics that, despite his right wing history, the new Israeli Prime Minister might yet turn out to be a pragmatist and peacemaker, rather than an ideologue and promoter of Jewish settlement.
But in Cairo on Sunday, Jordan did nothing to block the Arab League resolution, and Egypt actively promoted it. Arab patience with Mr Netanyahu has run out. The clock has been turned back to the era of the Shamir government in the early 1990s, before Yitzhak Rabin came to power in 1992, recognised the PLO and accelerated the peace process.
Mr Netanyahu and his aides have taken a predictably fatalistic view of the new diplomatic freeze and the calls for a renewed Arab boycott, describing them as Palestinian led efforts to pressurise Israel into new concessions, and remarking that the Arab states will suffer as much as Israel if trade is cut back.
Mr Netanyahu yesterday accused Arab states of ganging up on Israel but called the notion that they could revive the Arab boycott "absurd".
"What is required on the Arab side is to recognise that we are not always going to have agreement with Israel but that we don't go back to this mode of ganging up on Israel and making these absurd ideas that the boycott will be reinstated," Mr Netanyahu told Israel Radio's English news.
Some say privately that they believe the Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat, is now co ordinating an Arab attempt to bring down the Netanyahu government, and have it replaced by a more moderate, Labour led coalition.
Mr Netanyahu is adamant that there will be no capitulation to Arab pressure.
The bulldozers dig on at Har Homa, the East Jerusalem site of a planned new Jewish neighbourhood that has sparked this latest Arab diplomatic anger as well as two weeks of Intifada style clashes in the West Bank.
Another bulldozer yesterday rolled into the West Bank village of Zuril, to plough through the walls and eventually demolish the home of Moussa Ghneimat's widow and children. Ghneimat (28) was the Palestinian suicide bomber who blew up a Tel Aviv cafe, killing three Israeli women, 10 days ago.