Within weeks, he had also called early elections — making a winter strike the unlikeliest of occurrences. Postponed, again.

Months, even years, have passed, but Israel's fighter jets remain in their hangars. No pre-emptive strike has been launched. None seem imminent. Everyone in the know seems to know the strike is coming. Israel winks and tells them it is. And then nothing happens.

How to explain what for many may by now sound like Israel crying wolf? Israel feels compelled to knock on every nation's door and alert them to the dangers of a nuclear Iran. Israel must respond to the ugly Holocaust denial rhetoric coming out of a regime that seems intent on acquiring the tools to perpetrate the very same crime whose historical truth it seeks to deny and must make it crystal clear that it will respond to this threat. It cannot afford to project the image of the boy crying wolf — and yet it seems that is exactly what Israel has been doing lately.

Israel's posture almost looks like a scene from Mel Brooks's 1974 movie, Blazing Saddles, where the newly arrived black sheriff — confronted with the town's readiness to lynch him — points a gun at his own head and threatens to shoot himself if the racists do not drop their guns. The sheriff gets away with it — his bluff induces the desired change of behaviour. But in Israel's case, a bluff can only buy time, not solve the problem.