The parallels with Spain are clear. The virulent hatred of Tehran's rulers against the Jewish state is being played down. Witness how Rouhani's elusive answers about Holocaust denial were greeted with enthusiasm by a swooning media all too eager to put the Ahmadinejad years behind them. It is as if everything else that Iran does could somehow be made acceptable by a sudden reduction of its anti-Semitic rhetoric. 

Yet it is hard for Netanyahu to get his facts past his audiences — nobody among Western pundits and policymakers has much sympathy for him. They find him distasteful on account of his country's existence, or its policies, or its refusal to make concessions that could jeopardise its security. 

The New York Times called him "shrill". His denunciations of Iran elicited yawns. His demand for zero-enrichment — which, by the way, is nothing more than what six Chapter VII UN Security Council resolutions demand of Iran's regime — is being dismissed across the board as "unrealistic".

Netanyahu is a party pooper. And his warnings will not be heeded. Negotiations, which recommenced in Geneva on October 15, will probably be the prelude to broader Iranian-American engagement addressing other regional problems, where Iran's "legitimate demands" will be taken into account. While Iran will be invited to the table for negotiations on Syria, Afghanistan, the Gulf, WMDs and regional security, Israel will be kept at bay, with America's reassurance that the Jewish state's interests will never be compromised as the only guarantee Israel can rely on.

If Netanyahu knows about one thing, it is history. He is keenly aware that, despite all the shortcomings of historical analogies, a fate similar to the one of Czechoslovakia in 1938 is a distinct possibility. America, after all, promised it would never tolerate Assad's use of chemical weapons — and failed to live up to its promise. America intimated that Assad had to go — but America walked away from its warnings when Assad hunkered down and rode out the storm. Why would America's guarantees to Israel be anything more than "covenants without a sword", which, in Thomas Hobbes's immortal phrase, "are nothing but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all"?