It’s reflection season for those columnists with a penchant for marking their calendars with relevant dates to recall about missed opportunities.

Consider the coming third week of September, when Palestinians are scheduled to commemorate the fourth anniversary of their “second intifada,” an uprising that began jubilantly, with little studied projection by its leaders of where it might lead and what it might achieve.

Let’s see hands, please, from those who will be celebrating that day. Few? None?

Whichever way you cut it, historians will see this intifada as a time when the people of Palestine yet again failed a big political test and missed a historic opportunity. It’s not a pretty sight. We’re talking about 3,000 Palestinian lives lost (the equivalent of 280,000 Americans dying, say, in a civil rights struggle), an economy destroyed and a people pauperized, social and political institutions demolished, governmental authority bankrupted, academic life strangled, and a leadership rendered supine, having lost the trust of its people and the capacity to make a difference.

Meanwhile, Ariel Sharon, an outright thug with a long, bloodstained history of violence against Palestinians, continued to expand settlements and build a wall of hate that gouged its way through Palestinian land.

Why did it come to this?

This we know: In the first week of January, 2001, Yasser Arafat arrived at the White House to meet with President Clinton, who had just a bit over seven weeks in office, and who was to present the Palestinian leader with the so-called Clinton Proposals. The deal, which improved dramatically on what had been negotiated five months earlier at Camp David, offered Palestinians a settlement that was commensurate with their movement’s place in the balance of power. No more, no less.

Was it an equitable offer, responsive to all the demands that the people of Palestine were morally and politically entitled to? Heck, no. But that was all they were going to get at the time, given the place they occupied in the balance of power.

Yasser Arafat prevaricated. You don’t prevaricate at the moment of truth, and you don’t hesitate when history presents you with a turning point with which you are expected to turn. But he did just that.

The 80-year-old Palestinian struggle for national independence is a tale that is both epic and tragic — epic in the sense that the native people of Palestine never allowed themselves to be cowed into submission by British and later Zionist domination of their lives and land — and you surely take your hat off to such a people. But it is the tragic part of the tale that concerns us here.

This has to do with how Palestinians, or more accurately their self-serving leadership, missed opportunities all the way from the Peel Commission in 1936 to the White Paper in 1939, from the UN Partition Plan in 1947 to the Clinton Proposals in 2001.

The tragedy deepens when you consider this: Each time Palestinians went to the negotiating table, they asked to go back to the status quo ante, to the deal they had earlier spurned.

Today they want to go back to the 1967 borders, as then they wanted to go back to the UN designated borders from 20 years before. And in 1947 they would have given an arm and a leg to resurrect the recommendations of the Peel Commission, that allotted the Jewish community, numbering then roughly 400,000, a mere 20 percent of the land of Palestine, with the rest reverting to them.

Dennis Ross, for a dozen years Washington’s chief Mideast peace negotiator, plugging his new book “The Missing Peace” on PBS’s “Charlie Rose,” said last week that in his last meeting with Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader waxed nostalgic about the Clinton Proposals and expressed regret that he had not signed on the dotted line.

There were those of us — including this column in a plea published Jan. 4 — who urged Arafat to see reason. He did not, and now his people are left high and dry, going from negotiating statehood four years ago to negotiating over checkpoints today, doomed to have their national rights downsized one more time in a future settlement.

If I see Palestinian celebrators dancing in their streets to commemorate the intifada on its fourth anniversary in September, I will know that the issue is not that better leaders would’ve made better choices. I will know, in other words, that the fault is not anchored in our politicians but in ourselves.