Iran is the enemy Netanyahu has always wanted to destroy. Even from their bomb shelters, most Israelis support his war | Aluf Benn

Within Israel, Iran is seen as the ultimate threat. The prime minister knows this is his chance to rewrite his bloodied legacy

It's 1938 and Iran is Germany ... The Jewish people will not allow a second Holocaust." Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, recited slogans like these incessantly for decades, urging action against the gravest threat to the Jewish state - a nuclear-armed Iran. He conveyed the message to successive US presidents. He presented a bomb cartoon at the UN. At countless Holocaust memorial events he described Iran's nuclear ambitions as the present-day final solution".

Netanyahu talked and talked about the pressing Iranian threat, but his listeners were not convinced. They dismissed him as an alarmist whose deadline Iran crossed year after year without deploying a nuclear weapon (it still hasn't). Netanyahu's critics at home taunted him as a chicken who would never dare to attack Iran's nuclear installations - unlike his more decisive predecessors, who had ordered the bombing of nuclear reactors in Iraq and Syria.

Aluf Benn is the editor-in-chief of Haaretz