Palestinian ‘Days Since Last Missed Opportunity’ Sign Again Reset To Zero

The forty-ninth week in a row that the number has failed to break out of single digits.

Ramallah, August 27 – Inspectors replaced the digit today on a placard that tracks the time since the Palestinian leadership has squandered a chance to move toward peaceful resolution of the generations-old conflict with Jews over the territory both groups claim, placing a goose-egg figure in the final spot of the “Days since last missed opportunity” marker this afternoon.

Occupation Maintenance and Status Quo Preservation personnel filed their inspection report Thursday following their weekly audit of Palestinian leadership decisions. The report noted that the “Days since last missed opportunity” sign saw replacement of a different digit with a zero for the seventh week in a row. The incident represents the tenth week of the last eleven with a reset of the figure to zero, and, the report observes, the forty-ninth week in a row that the number has failed to break out of single digits.

“Palestinian rejection of the United Arab Emirates peace agreement with Israel forced us to reset the count again,” the report noted. “When reports of the deal emerged last week, Palestinian leaders across the narrow slice of the political spectrum that mainstream Palestinian society considers acceptable blasted the accord. Earlier this week no official statements by those leaders had repeated the rejection, allowing the ‘Days since’ figure to reach as high as three, but by Wednesday morning, accusations of betrayal, illegitimacy, and sundry other epithets had brought the number back down to zero.”

While for most purposes the Palestinian government suffers a split between the Fatah-ruled West bank and the Hamas-governed Gaza Strip, inspectors take into account leaders associated with both camps in their assessment. “In terms of constituent representation, both parties can make a credible claim to being called leaders for our purposes,” an inspector explained. “It’s a chicken-and-egg conundrum whether Palestinian society at large favors militant opposition to Jewish sovereignty over other options, and therefore the recognized leadership’s expressed sensibilities reflect that preference, or whether generations of antisemitic incitement by official Palestinian media and education institutions have engineered such sensibilities in the population at large, rendering acceptance of peace nigh impossible. But we will keep doing what we do, if for no other reason than we get paid, which is more than one can say for the millions of poor souls under Palestinian administration who do not enjoy the privilege of belonging to the right clan or having the right connections with whichever faction controls the relevant purse strings at the moment.”

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