Israel heaved a collective sigh of relief after listening to the speech delivered by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Sept. 30 at the UN General Assembly. Almost nothing emerged of the expectations raised in recent months regarding the address, which was anticipated as being constitutive and extremely important. In the end, it was mainly confusing. Abbas did not resign; he did not expressly annul the Oslo Accord; and the bombshell he promised to drop (and did) failed to explode because it was equipped with a time-delay mechanism. The speech that was supposed to be a historic leap turned out to be a baby step. The problem is that it is another baby step toward the abyss. When Israel and the Palestinians fall into the chasm, they will recall the desperate UN General Assembly speech of 2015 and ask, Why didn’t we see the writing on the wall?

Indeed, what Abbas did before the half-empty plenum of the United Nations was to in effect write on the wall in big letters. The problem is that few bothered with the content of his words, and even fewer took it seriously. Ostensibly, Abbas’ declaration that the Palestinians will cease honoring the agreements signed with Israel should have constituted a veritable earthquake. Instead, it was a conditional earthquake: No one knows when it will happen, how it will happen, what exactly will happen or if it will happen at all. One possibility is that the speech will hover above for several days until it dissipates into thin air, like its predecessors. It is also possible, however, that it will provoke changes on the ground.

According to Israeli analysis, the most telling signs that the announcement was an empty one — one that won't lead to action — are that no actual target date or deadline was cited, and no ultimatum was expressly made. When will the Palestinians cease honoring the agreements? Under what conditions? Which of the agreements? Abbas left all these issues ambiguous and undefined.

“So long as he does not declare, for example, that the partitioning of the West Bank into Areas A, B and C [designating Israeli and Palestinian administrative and security responsibilities as per Oslo] is null and void, so long as he does not set a date for the dismantling of the Palestinian Authority, it is impossible to view the threat as something serious.” This was the view expressed to Al-Monitor by an anonymous Israeli source expert in relations between Israel and the Palestinians and implementation of the agreements between them. “Don’t forget that some of the agreements in force today allow the Palestinians to receive the taxes it is entitled to from Israel. We are talking about large sums of money, and I don’t think that the authority will want to forfeit them,” he said.