For the first time anyone could recall, Netanyahu had skipped his scheduled speech at Monday’s opening of the new Knesset session in order to marshall his material and prepare his speech. That cancellation, which came just hours after a reported major raid on an Iranian base in Syria, sparked a mini-panic among some Israelis. Awaiting Netanyahu’s address, the news anchor at Israel’s Hadashot TV news assessed, with only a small degree of exaggeration, that “every household in Israel” was now bracing for the prime minister’s address and wondering whether war with Iran was “inevitable.”

“No,” came the succinct answer from military analyst Roni Daniel.

Elaborating, a widely respected former Defense Ministry official, Amos Gilad, said in the studio: “Let’s reassure the public: There is no danger of war. And Iran is not attacking us,”

Gilad, however, then rather undermined his attempts at defusing panic by adding: “Iran is determined to get rid of Israel. They take the historical view… They are developing missiles. They say the agreement with Obama allows them in eight years time to develop nuclear weapons if they want to…”

It is that patient Iranian approach, that relentless Iranian threat, that Netanyahu was determined to highlight in his presentation. To that end, his speech had several complementary goals:

First, showing the Iranians the potency of Israel’s security and intelligence apparatuses — capable of removing Iran’s own closely guarded material from right under its nose (and consequently capable of identifying the key personnel, like Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, leading the nuclear weapons program).

Second, detailing, stage by stage, the progress of the Iranian nuclear weapons program as gleaned from Iran’s own documents, map, photos and videos — in five stages that he showcased slide by slide: from designing nuclear weapons, to developing nuclear cores, to building nuclear implosion systems, to preparing nuclear tests and, finally, to integrating nuclear weapons on missiles.

Third, giving the international community extraordinary evidence on which to formulate a more appropriate response to Tehran’s terrifying duplicity.

US President Donald Trump speaks during a joint press conference with Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari in the Rose Garden of the White House on April 30, 2018, in Washington, DC. Trump said the current Iranian nuclear deal was ‘unacceptable.’ (AFP/Saul Loeb)

And, fourth, providing Trump with the intelligence information he needs to take the firmest stance against the maintenance of the 2015 deal in its current form — no matter how derisive or threatening the Iranian response.

Will it work? Will the P5+1 countries suddenly discover a new iron will when it comes to confronting the malevolent ayatollahs? Netanyahu, for one, evidently puts little faith in that. But, as he detailed, he has been coordinating with the Trump administration. And the president, within minutes of Netanyahu’s presentation in Tel Aviv, was declaring on the White House lawn that Netanyahu had sent the right message, and that an Iranian path to bomb in seven years is “not acceptable.”

Netanyahu argued Monday, as he has argued consistently all along, that the 2015 accord is “a terrible deal” that “should never have been concluded.” Now, he said, he had the proof.

Then US president Barack Obama, right, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hold a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House on November 9, 2015. (AFP/Saul Loeb)

The Obama administration claimed that no deal would have satisfied Israel, but that was always untrue. Israel wanted to see a deal that would dismantle Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program; the 2015 deal simply didn’t do that. Again, Netanyahu now had the proof.

Even Monday, armed with that Iranian archive of danger and duplicity, Netanyahu did not demand that the deal be scrapped. He stressed, rather, that the accord, as it stands, gives Iran a clear path to a nuclear arsenal, and asserted that the material he was presenting shows without a shadow of doubt that the Iranians fully intend to follow that path — to enrich mountains of uranium, to develop their ballistic missiles, to weaponize.

His message to the world on Iran’s rapacious leaders and their nuclear goals: They’re dangerous. They’re duplicitous. They have to be stopped. And… it’s not too late.