After twenty years of occupation, life in the occupied territories consisted of a familiar, but almost intolerable, routine for most of the Palestinians there. By the beginning of 1987, it was clear that no outside factors would help extricate the people from their harsh situation. The Palestinian issue was the last on the list of priorities at Arab summits. Palestinians could not fail to notice that, even when these leaders treated Palestine as a priority, they had very little to offer in the way of solutions or deliverance to the people living either under occupation or in the refugee camps. The PLO political strategy, conducted from Tunis and based on the construction of a Cairo–Amman diplomatic safety net for Arafat, produced no solutions, either to the occupation or the refugee problem. The PLO appeared resigned to the loss of its homeland and to the Palestinians' failure to achieve self-determination. The Israeli political situation remained mired in inflexibility and intransigence, as it had been since 1967.

The only vibrant political arena was that of local politics in the occupied territories. It had a young national leadership, consisting of professionals and middle-class urbanites, each affiliated loosely to one of the many PLO groups in Tunis. But this leadership also lacked any clear strategy for ending the occupation, a frustrating failing that was accentuated in the 1980s by the liberation of oppressed people in East Asia, Eastern Europe and South Africa.