But an attack by either Israel or the US on Iran’s nuclear installations would be a calamitous mistake, or, as Meir Dagan, a former chief of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service, put it, “the stupidest idea” possible. So it is to be hoped that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s war rhetoric and vulgar manipulation of the memory of the Holocaust are nothing more than a ploy to divert the world’s attention from the Palestinian problem that he has done nothing to resolve.