As the rift between the two main Palestinian factions widens, many West Bank youths, for decades the shock troops of their national movement, are growing increasingly disenchanted with their feuding leaders.
Membership numbers are hard to come by, but dozens of interviews with students on university campuses across the West Bank revealed growing bitterness at the failure of Palestinian leaders to end the Israeli occupation or even construct a unified front to oppose it.
Mohammed Abu Latifa a student at Bethlehem University, said he had lost faith in the Fatah party of Western-backed Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas because of his failure to halt Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank.
"President Abbas says he will not negotiate while there are settlements, but the settlement building continues and the talks continue," he says, referring to US efforts to relaunch negotiations between the two sides.
But the 21-year-old is hardly more charitable towards the Islamist Hamas movement, which seized the Gaza Strip in June 2007 and is pledged to the destruction of the Jewish state.
"Hamas does not interact with us as though we are a people that understands things, but instead they play on our emotions and incite us," he says.
Emad Ghiyada, a professor at Birzeit University who specialises in student movements, says factional bickering and the stalled peace process have left both secular and Islamic groups struggling to appeal to young people.
"There has been a drop in youth membership in the political groups," he says. "The parties have failed to realise any of their goals, whether by armed struggle, or popular uprisings, or by peaceful means."
Earlier this month Birzeit hosted an event to protest perceived Israeli threats to the Al-Aqsa mosque, a flashpoint site in Jerusalem sacred to Muslims and Jews that was the epicentre of the 2000 Palestinian uprising.
Israeli police had clashed with Palestinian protestors just outside the mosque days earlier, and organisers expected around 9,000 students to come to express their outrage.
Only 60 showed up, Ghiyada says, despite the fact Al-Aqsa is one of the only subjects on which all political parties, including Fatah and Hamas, agree.
A recent survey by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research found 27 percent of young people do not support any political party, which roughly matches the rate of apathy among the population as a whole.
Nader Said, a sociology professor at Birzeit University, has also noticed the gap between party leaders and the students he teaches.
"The Palestinian leadership in all the factions is now singing in a valley and the students are singing in another valley," he says.
"It's a great pity about the youth, because there is this alienation between them and the Palestinian leadership, which are removed from the basic goals and values of the people. For the youth there is no clear alternative."
Not all students have given up on politics, and those who support one faction are likely to place the blame for the sorry state of Palestinian affairs on their opponents.
The student movements in the West Bank and Gaza have also suffered from crackdowns on public displays of opposition by the two rival governments, which could in part explain the low turnout at university rallies.
It is unclear what impact if any the increasing disenchantment will have on Palestinian elections which are set to take place sometime next year -- and are another point of bitter contention between Fatah and Hamas.
A poll carried out by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre in October found just 23.5 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza would stay home, while 40 percent would vote for Fatah and 18.7 percent for Hamas.
Many young people see no alternative.
"Seventy-five percent of Palestinian leaders are liars, and Hamas and the (Palestinian) Authority are focused on their own private interests," says Sama Effendi, a student at Bethlehem University.
"But if there are elections, I will vote for Hamas."
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