One year ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's address before the UN General Assembly featured a cartoon Iranian nuclear bomb. This year, the Israeli prime minister brandished a rhetorical STOP sign warning of the perils of negotiating with Iran and the Palestinians. 

In contrast with the historic steps taken in New York toward an Iranian-US rapprochement to almost universal acclaim, the Israel-Palestine issue was a pale, lackluster footnote. The alphabet soup of international support groups — from Tony Blair’s Economic Initiative for Palestine to the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee (AHLC) — meeting on the periphery of the General Assembly, left all parties standing in place. PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas focused tamely on Palestine. For Israel's Netanyahu, like most everyone else, the Iran story has sucked all the air out of the room. 

To be fair, there is little on this front that could compete with the dramatic opening of the first direct top-level US-Iranian dialogue in more than a generation and the crafting of a unanimous majority at the Security Council on Syria. Only an announcement of a precedent-breaking departure in the business-as-usual atmosphere that has depressed expectations on all sides of the table would come close … and such a dramatic breakthrough was nowhere in sight.

Compared with these low expectations, even the “big news” on the talks was particularly bloodless.