President Shimon Peres, who, unlike Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, is skeptical of the utility of an attack on Iran’s nuclear installations, spoke of the “threat of extermination” facing Israel. Even Defense Minister Ehud Barak, usually a coolly rational thinker, chose Yad Mordechai, a Kibbutz named after Mordechai Anilewitz, the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, to alert world opinion against “Holocaust deniers, first and foremost the Iranian president, who calls for the destruction of the Jewish people.”