Israeli-Palestinian issue draws less spotlight at UN General Assembly

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which dominated discourse at the previous annual UN General Assembly, seemed to be brushed aside this year.

Apart from a speech by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas focusing on the thorny topic, it was almost absent throughout the UN session, except for a brief mention by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Sounding almost like an afterthought, Netanyahu said his country was “committed to achieving peace with all our Arab neighbors, including the Palestinians.”

The Israeli leader did not even go into any details on the way to solve the conflict.

“As long as he (Netanyahu) is in power, he will try to make it a non-issue domestically and more significantly in the international arena,” said Nimrod Goren, head of Mitvim, the Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies.

“Israel is trying to delink its foreign relations from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and it goes very harshly against those actors that try to do this linkage,” he said.

With more pressing issues on the international agenda and in the Middle East region in particular, the decades-long conflict is now regarded by many as a given at least for the near future, since all sides are resigned to believing it is insoluble.

For Netanyahu, this is already a success.

US President Donald Trump did not even mention the conflict in his speech.

In the past, it was an international consensus that the two-state solution was the only way to solve the conflict.

But after years of implying by the Netanyahu government that a Palestinian state is off the table, the new US administration led by Trump has eventually dealt a lethal blow to the idea of Palestinian statehood.

In his speech, Abbas warned that the two-state solution was “in jeopardy” and that there is “no place left for Palestine” in the light of Israeli settlement activities in territories it occupied after the 1967 Middle East war.

At last year’s session, the Palestinian issue was prominent.

It took place in the final days of office for former US president Barack Obama, a staunch supporter of Palestinian statehood.

At the time, Netanyahu felt pressure to make a commitment to the two-state solution while standing at the UN podium. His government feared Obama was going to take steps to promote a binding UN resolution against Israel.

But Goren doubts his sincerity then.

“The question is whether he’s ever believed in the twostate solution. What did he mean when he talked about the two-state solution?” the Israeli expert said.

And now with the backing of Trump, Netanyahu can shed his mask and dispense with lip service.

“If the American president is not talking about the twostate solution, Netanyahu feels that he has no obligation to do so himself,” Goren said.

“He is trying to reflect the notion that the Palestinian issue is not of high relevance anymore.”

The Israeli prime minister devoted the bulk of his speech to the threat of the Iranian nuclear program.

“Netanyahu turned the Iranian threat into the be-all and end-all of his policies, pushing the Palestinian issue off the public agenda,” wrote Mazal Mualem, a columnist for the Al-Monitor website.

The Israeli leader views his UN appearance as a “huge success,” she added.