ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) – Changes are sweeping the Middle East, but you would hardly have guessed it from Arab leaders this week.

At their summit here, they were wary of putting a spotlight on any issue that might call attention to problems in their own regimes.

Rather than join the international push to get Syrian troops out of Lebanon, the summit closed with a statement backing Syria against U.S. sanctions.

The best the leaders could do on peace with Israel was reheat a proposal that went nowhere when they first made it in 2002.

And there was no real sign that they want to be engines for democratic reform.

The sole break in the atmosphere of silence – a spat between Presidents Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Bashar Assad of Syria during the meeting’s televised final session Wednesday – was quickly shunted aside.

Their bickering was over a relatively minor point: who would be on a delegation that the summit decided to send to the United States, Europe and elsewhere to promote the group’s rehashed 2002 peace plan.

When Assad said his government should be on it, Mubarak interrupted and said Syria should leave it to others to explain the Arab position. Assad shot back: “We have the right to be in this committee. This issue is ours and the land is ours.”

Tunisia’s foreign minister, Habib Ben Yahia, broke in to end the display of temper. “I would like to remind you that this is a public session and therefore I suggest that we end the discussion of this subject,” he said.

The summit was “an exercise in wasting time,” columnist Abdel Wahhab Badrkhan complained Thursday in the Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat. “It would have been better for the leaders to have devoted (their time) to the Lebanese-Syrian situation … Or they could have dealt openly with political reform.”

Even participants acknowledged the disconnect between ordinary Arabs’ desire for progress and some of their leaders’ resistance to change.

“When we look at what will be achieved during this summit versus the ambitions on the Arab street, we find that we are still very much at the beginning of the road,” said Sudan’s foreign minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail.

Some Arabs are taking matters into their own hands. Mass demonstrations in Lebanon by opponents of Syria’s domination there brought down a government. Iraqis, braving terrorists’ threats, elected a National Assembly in January, and Palestinians elected a president to succeed the late Yasser Arafat.

Such developments have made the region’s autocratic regimes nervous as they face pressure for greater democracy.

Several leaders at the summit insisted reform must be carried out at a pace of their choosing – and the gathering was happy to leave the matter there, putting aside past promises to sign a pledge on carrying out change.

Delving into the turmoil in Lebanon would have taken the leaders into divisive areas – such as the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, which sparked the anti-Syrian protests in Beirut. Many Lebanese blame Syria for the killing, and his death angered Hariri’s close friends, the Saudi royal family.

A radical proposal from Jordan that Arab nations open relations with Israel before the return of occupied Arab lands went nowhere, rejected in particular by hardline governments like Syria and Libya.

Algeria’s government, the host, had warned from the outset that this would not be the summit of normalization with Israel. Algeria is emerging from an Islamic insurgency that killed 120,000 people over a decade and apparently did not want to risk opening itself up to accusations of being soft on the Israelis.

Instead, the leaders brought out their 2002 proposal: Relations with Israel in exchange for its full withdrawal from occupied Arab lands.

The summit also called for an end to foreign occupation in Iraq, but the leaders said nothing about Iraq’s calls for its Arab neighbors to do more to stop people from crossing their borders to join the bloody insurgency.

U.S. State Department spokesman Adam Ereli called the summit “a missed opportunity.”

A political cartoon in Al-Hayat had a sharper take, showing the Arab ship of state firmly anchored on a dry sea bed.

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Zeina Karam covers the Arab world and Lebanese and Syria issues for The Associated Press from Beirut.