Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa addressed the issue head on, warning those gathered in Sharm el Sheikh that “the Arab soul is broken” adding, “the Tunisian revolution is not far from us.”

Said Sadek.

"The regimes in the Middle East are trying to learn the mistakes and trying to cool the tense situation by avoiding any more provocations like human-rights violations, like rising prices, you know things like that. And so that might be a way to postpone the upcoming or the inevitable social, economic or political revolution, but cannot abort it," Sadek said.

Sadek says the only way to truly avoid upheaval is to start political reform, something lacking in virtually every country in the region where rulers have stayed in power long after any vision they might once have had for their countries died out.

The Carnegie Center’s Amr Hamzawi says, in the broadest sense, the events in Tunisia unfolded much as they did in other parts of the world, from Eastern Europe, to Latin America and several Asian nations. The Arab world, he says, is not immune to democracy.

"It is a confirmation that we are not an exception to humanity," Hamzawi said. "Arabs wish to see accountable governments, wish to see better power distribution, wish to see checks and balances. They do not like authoritarianism, and they acted in that spirit in Tunisia."

Hamzawi says each country has a tipping point, but when it would be, and how it would play out, is anyone’s guess.