In his speech, Netanyahu prepared the ground not only for a possible Israeli strike on Iran next spring, but for an election campaign that will be dubbed “the most fateful since the establishment of the state.” Netanyahu will tell the Israeli voters, as he already began to Thursday, that in this matter, you have no one to rely on, not even our Father in Heaven, except for me.

Netanyahu directed his address not at U.S. President Barack Obama, who is as proficient in the intelligence information as he is, but to the American people, people who don’t have the patience for long words or in-depth discussions of centrifuges and enriched uranium and detonators. So he did what he does best: He took a complex, amorphous topic and made it simpler, more tangible, more easily absorbed and understood.

This has always been Netanyahu’s tactic, whether it was a press conference at the Finance Ministry (“the fat man and the thin man” ), or at a briefing on the proposed reform to the Israel Lands Administration (“How long does it take to enclose a balcony” ). He did it at the United Nations on Thursday.

Read the article in full on Haaretz.