Would that I were able to report that the occupied territories in Palestine have just regressed in recent years. Regression, corrosive an experience though it may be for a society to go through, implies that a people merely have moved back to a worse but well-located time in their history.

For Palestinians it is worse than that. The very tenor of their political, economic and social life has descended to a new and ominous level of degradation. And the business of rational analysis in this instant grows unsteady before the enormity of the facts.

First there’s that wall of hate that Israel is erecting deep into their territory, in places encircling entire towns, villages and farms, and disrupting the lives, not to mention violating the human rights, of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants.

To be sure, the World Court at The Hague last week conducted hearings on the issue, but its judges will take months before they issue an opinion. Moreover, though the court’s rulings carry moral force, they are not in the end legally binding. Meanwhile, leaders of the Israeli entity will go ahead with their criminal plans to make the wall a permanent structure, resulting in the ultimate annexation of 40 percent of the territories, themselves a mere 20 percent remnant of the Palestinians’ ancestral patrimony.

Is this enough to have you despair of a meaningful future for these long-suffering people?

If not, then consider how never before in their modern history have Palestinians been poorer and angrier. Living for close to four decades under a military occupation that has throttled their economy by robbing them of their land, water and other resources — and now hemming them in behind a 450-mile barrier of walls, fences, trenches, concertina wires and surveillance cameras — they feel those murderous resentments, and deep loathing for their tormentors, that only a subjugated people feel welling up in their national subconscious.

To say that the people of Palestine find themselves, as never before, so leaderless and fragmented, is not to resort to hyperbole. The Palestinian Authority today is broke, in disarray and ineffectual, so much so that a majority of Palestinians, according to the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center, believe the authority effectively no longer exists, and 30 percent say unabashedly that it would be in the “national interest” to abolish it.

You want to know why the PA is broke, unable, according to its Economic Minister Maher Masri, to meet, among other financial obligations, this month’s payroll, then here are a few gentle hints: The EU donor countries are withholding millions of dollars in contributions to the organization until it stopped paying security officers in cash, a practice that has created a huge slush fund; the International Monetary Fund says in a report issued last fall, according to the Washington Post, that more than $900 million in public funds were diverted to Israeli bank accounts controlled by the PA president and his financial officer, or to other uses of which the IMF says it could find no full accounting; and the president’s wife, who lives in Paris, is being investigated by French prosecutors for a possibly “improper” transfer to her private account of roughly $12 million in public funds.

The current intifada, violent and anarchic as it is, is directed by Palestinians not only at those who occupy their homeland, you see, but also at those who occupy their home. Sure, they want to scrub off the grime of foreign occupation off their bodies and souls, and scour it from their tired earth, as it were, but they also hold it against those who had set out a goal for them, a promise of salvation, only to see that slip, again and again, out of range of their racked fingers.

One thing is clear: Young Palestinians — and call them Young Turks, if you wish — have been registering their discontent at the ballot box by continuing to wrest control of the large network of student, labor and professional unions, along with student government bodies, that traditionally had been controlled by Fatah, the backbone of the Palestinian Authority.

Is it not easy to see them as the next generation of Palestinian leaders?