Palestinians have always felt like the forgotten and neglected party in the Middle East — not a state, occupied by Israel and sidelined by the Arabs. Abu Alaa (Ahmed Qurei), the former Palestinian prime minister and chief negotiator of the 1993 Oslo Accord, recited once in Oslo an Indian poem: "I am alone, you are alone, let's be alone together."

Well, 21 years later, Palestinians and Israelis still sense their isolation but separately. On this note, a senior Fatah official in Ramallah told Al-Monitor that the Palestinian leadership feels completely sidelined these days, both in the region and within the international community: "In Israel, the Palestinian issue is the forgotten issue of the elections, even by the left, and in the United States, there seems to be little political will to engage on permanent status after the elections. Meanwhile, the European Union is too weak to move alone on Palestinian statehood and the Arab countries are focusing almost solely on the challenges that the Islamic State [IS] poses to them in the wars in Syria and Iraq as well as the Iranian challenge."

According to this official, the Palestinian leadership is contemplating how to deal with this situation. He claims that the region and the world will hear about Palestine in two forms come April 2015. The first new front line would be a "diplomatic intifada," calling on international and regional frameworks for conflict resolution and statehood, based on international law. This diplomatic attack will be followed by a nonviolent popular intifada that will combine more demonstrations around settlements, the separation wall and East Jerusalem.

He said, "This is the time for independence either by diplomacy as a kind of a war of independence."