With Their Repeated Rejections, Palestinians Risk Total Irrelevance

Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman, shocked Jewish leaders at a closed-door meeting in New York last year. "In the last several decades, the Palestinian leadership has missed one opportunity after the other and rejected all the peace proposals it was given," said bin Salman, according to press reports. "It is about time the Palestinians take the proposals and agree to come to the negotiations table or shut up and stop complaining." The future king even said that the Palestinian issue was not a top priority for the Saudis, adding that Saudi Arabia "has much more urgent and important issues to deal with" in the Middle East.

Less than two years earlier, in the same city, then-President Barack Obama devoted just one sentence of his last speech before the United Nations General Assembly to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One sentence was still more than the year before, when, for the first time since becoming president, Obama did not even mention the conflict during his annual speech at the United Nations. Compare that with Obama's first three speeches before the General Assembly—in 2009, 2010, and 2011—in which he focused 10 percent, 23 percent, and 18 percent of his lengthy remarks, respectively, on the peace process. The drop-off is striking.

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