There is a recording making its way around Arab intelligence services this month. In it, Mahmoud Abbas, the 89-year-old president of the Palestinian Authority, serving twenty years into a four-year term, expresses quiet satisfaction that Saudi Arabia was struck by Iranian regime missiles during the war. He says, in the coded language Palestinian politicians use when they think nobody is listening, that the Saudis had it coming.

The Palestinian commentator Ahmad al-Attawna put words to it on Arab television:

“The Palestinian people clearly have no leadership, and I’m not speaking metaphorically; even in reality, there is no true leadership capable of presenting the Palestinian people with a vision or a sense of where they are headed.”

That is a Palestinian, in Arabic, to an Arab audience, saying the thing Palestinian intellectuals have been whispering in private from Amman to Ramallah for years.