One is the realisation by a growing number of Fatah leaders (fuelled by a rigorous debate within Palestinian society) that the strategy of an "armed intifada" has proven an unmitigated disaster to the Palestinian cause.
And there is a growing rivalry between this "Old Guard" of outsiders and the "Young Guard" of insiders who grew up in the street battles of the first intifada.
The "Al Aksa" intifada began, and the result has been more than a thousand dead Israelis, almost three thousand dead Palestinians, collapsed diplomacy, a "peace" fence, and a growing sense on both sides that the Other is never again to be trusted.
He talks about not only the Oslo accords but also the night Rabin was assassinated and the growing Palestinian intifada as Israel swung to the right.
Among Palestinians from all walks of life, there is a quiet but growing sentiment that their intifada, or uprising -- which broke out four years ago today -- has largely failed as an armed struggle, and lost its character as a popular resistance movement.
As things currently stand, if change in the Palestinians status were to occur, the catalyst to the process will not be simple or pretty: it will either be renewed violence in the Palestinian territories (that is, a third intifada) or growing international pressure.
Many Sahrawis, who liken their plight to the Palestinians', now call their growing protest campaign an intifada against Moroccan rule.
From this collapse grew the second intifada, essentially a popular revolt, first against the Israeli occupation and the realisation that the Oslo peace process would never bring it to an end, and, potentially, against Arafat and the Palestine Authority (PA) which had so long connived in the fiction that it could.
Miral (Freida Pinto), a young Arab woman growing up in Jerusalem during the first intifada of the 1980s, is embroiled in this struggle on a number of fronts.
A weekend of febrile violence in the West Bank and east Jerusalem has led to growing fears of a third Palestinian intifada.
