The Palestinians are famous as the people who never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity (the quip is usually attributed to Abba Eban, although he was talking about Arabs in general). This year, however, the Middle East has suddenly and unexpectedly become the land of opportunity, and attention is starting to be drawn to whether the Palestinians will be able to take advantage of some of it, or will miss out again.

The first opportunity is the long-running, hopelessly misnamed “Mid-East peace process”. Talks between Israel and the Palestinian authority have been stalled for about as long as anyone can remember. The stalemate was formalised this week with the resignation of George Mitchell, the American envoy who had been nominally responsible for trying to end it; Barack Obama managed to give a landmark speech on Mid-East policy yesterday without even mentioning him.

It’s hard to blame the Palestinians too much on this one, since it’s become obvious that the present Israeli government has no intention of negotiating a settlement — at least not one that any possible Palestinian representatives could accept. But since hypocrisy can often be exposed by complying with the other side’s ostensible demands, the Palestinians could have met the request for talks “without preconditions” (i.e. without Israel having to keep the commitments it had made under the “road map”) by just sitting down at the table and saying “Right, here we are — what’s your proposal?”

The second opportunity is “Plan B”, the Palestinian move to seek international recognition as an independent state via a resolution of the UN general assembly in September. This was clearly expounded by PA president Mahmoud Abbas in a New York Times op-ed on Tuesday; an essential precondition was his earlier agreement with Hamas for a national unity government.

Abbas and others argue that internationalising the conflict in this way offers a way to break the current impasse. The Americans, however, are not prepared to jettison Israel to that extent, and Obama, although he implicitly criticised Israel as well, spoke against the proposed resolution and the Hamas deal.

But this just raises the question already implicit in Abbas’s words: is the UN move a serious strategy in its own right, or is it an ambit claim to increase the pressure on Israel — to get serious about peace — and the US — to either put pressure on Israel or to come up with a plan of its own.

The third opportunity, of course, is that being seized by the Palestinian masses themselves as part of the region’s wave of revolutions. Although Abbas is by no means among the worst of the region’s leaders, his government would still be an appropriate target for popular revolt (earlier in the year there were moves in that direction). This week, however, Palestinian “people power” was directed not against their inept representatives but against their real rulers, Israel.

The mass protests on Israel’s frontiers may or may not be a premonition of something bigger to come. Peter Beinart in The Daily Beast says that “something fundamental has changed” and “the Palestinians are taking control of their destiny”; he may be right, but that’s a brave call to make on one day of protests.

But it at least appears that there is a continuity between the democratic awakening in the Arab world and the plight of the Palestinians; a connection that Obama could not help but acknowledge. And it serves as a reminder that Abbas’s PA is not all there is to Palestinian activism, and that there is no reason to suppose that the alternatives will be, from Israel’s point of view, any easier to deal with. They may be much harder.

It’s a common but rather strange misapprehension that intransigence can bring moderation to an adversary’s demands. Israel and its allies on the American right seem to have worked on the basis that by refusing to meeet even the moderate Palestinian leadership half way, they would encourage it to weaken its demands further or secure its replacement by still more moderate elements.

In fact, of course, the reverse is usually the case: intransigence breeds intransigence, unmet demands are escalated not retracted, and concessions that were refused to moderates end up having to be made — with interest — to extremists. See for examples the British in Ireland, the French in Algeria and the whites in Zimbabwe.

The Palestinians may yet win what those other victims of colonialism won, or they may miss the opportunity — all of them — yet again. Stay tuned.