For nearly 60 years, everyone has had a piece of the Palestinian Arabs: the former Soviet Union, Syria, Iran, Egypt, Israel, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and, yes, America, too. Everyone has partaken except the Palestinian Arabs themselves.

Outside parties decide what is good for the Palestinian Arabs based on what is good for those parties’ interests in the region.

Saddam wanted suicide martyrs — as does Iran — to bug Israel. Should Iran and Iraq ever reach some mutually satisfying status quo with Israel, funds and training for these Palestinian Arab martyrs will dry up in a hurry.

Saudi Arabia wants little Palestinian Arab Wahhabi jihadists running around and Saudi-style Islam spreading out in Gaza and the West Bank to block Iranian influence and make a splash, regardless of whether this vision of darkness fits into the more open and liberal Levant.

Israel has always supported its collaborators for positions of Palestinian Arab leadership in order to avoid exploring more painful solutions to a problem that will not go away.

And America likes to stretch its superpower status with the notion that — as the late Anwar Sadat used to say — it retains 99% of the cards, even though that is largely a myth.

The Russians and Europeans stir a lot in the kitchen to get more Arab business but never deliver a meal.

In the midst of it all, disoriented Palestinian Arabs keep hoping for a leadership that is courageous and purposeful enough to chart its own course.

It won’t happen.

What kind of leadership can be expected from a prime minister who says, “We are not seekers of office but seekers of martyrdom?” This is what the so-called Hamas government prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, is fond of repeating. And what sort of president goes around promising new elections and threatening resignation from one week to the next? This is just about all, the so-called head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, has been doing.

Going down the line, the only common denominators between all figures of authority among Palestinian Arabs have been mediocrity and dishonesty.

As a result, an estimated 5 million Palestinian Arabs have for nearly six decades walked the battlefields like pigeons whose heads jerk in every direction depending on where the next bullet pops.

But are they blameless?

Back in the heyday of the major leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, Palestinian Arabs were fervent Arab nationalists. This was true until the early ’70s, when ascendant Saudi Islam took over from the defeated Nasser. Then they surfed styles modeling themselves after Eastern bloc socialists and flamboyant Che Guevaras. During the golden years of the Oslo accords, between 1993 and 1996, they were peacemongers in love with Jews. Today, the Palestinian Arabs has split into the revolutionary Islamic models of the mad mullahs of Iran and the reactionary oil princes of the Gulf. Apologists say that, as they are dependent on the kindness of others to exist, Palestinian Arabs have little choice but to be chameleons.

For those reasons and more, the latest agreement to calm Palestinian Arab internecine conflict in the city of Mecca under the auspices of King Abdullah Bin Abdelaziz of Saudi Arabia will not end the Palestinian Arab conundrum.

It is only a matter of time before Iran stirs its operatives in Hamas to disrupt the accord — if only to upset Saudi Arabia, as Tehran views Riyadh as an archrival in its influence among Arabs. Egypt, vexed by being deprived of much influence over Palestinian Arab affairs — a fig leaf for its actual impotence in Arab politics — will push its operatives in Fatah to agitate so that it can mediate.

Syria, never one to stay out of mayhem-making, will join in via Hezbollah in Lebanon, which has demonstrated its ability to meddle in the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict through Hamas and other Islamic groups in Gaza.

Palestinian Arabs cannot hope that Europe, America, or Israel will talk to a government dominated by Hamas, which says it shall never renounce armed struggle against Israel but will accept a “truce.” That sort of juvenile reasoning may work out in Gaza but not in world politics.

Nor can Fatah, the other partner in this Saudi-brokered agreement, accept a minority status, having grown fat and rich by dominating the Palestinian Arab scene and treasury.

In the end, the essential Palestinian Arab problem is not that the Palestinian Arabs are dependent on the kindness of others but that they lack two of the essential ingredients of nation-building: unified purpose and vision.