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were a regional superpower, with a military as effective as any in the world, and a high-tech economic sector justifiably compared to Silicon Valley.

Every few weeks, Bibi, Lieberman and I would meet for a wide-ranging discussion on the patio of the Prime Minister’s residence. Shortly after we’d abandoned the idea of a military strike, I raised head-on my objections to the skewed image Bibi was promoting of our country. It wasn’t just inaccurate, I said. Especially when his rhetoric was in full flight, and he compared the prospect of a nuclear Iran to a new “Holocaust,” it struck me as a betrayal of the core tenet of Zionism: an state in which Jews were in control of their own destiny. “We are in that position now,” I said. It was nonsensical to argue we were so threatened by everything around us, for instance, that we couldn’t “risk” taking the initiative required to disentangle ourselves from the Palestinians on the West Bank. “I don’t get you,” I said, turning to Lieberman as well. “Your rhetoric suggests you have spines of steel. But your behavior is living proof of the old saying that it’s easier to take Jews out of the galut, than take the galut out of the Jews.” Galut is Hebrew for the diaspora. “The whole Zionist project was based on the idea of taking our fate into our own hands, and actively trying to change the reality around us. But you behave as if we never left the galut. You’re mired in a mindset of pessimism, passivity and anxiety, which in terms of policy or action, leads to paralysis. Of course, there are risks in any action, or any policy initiative. But in the situation where Israel finds itself, the biggest risk of all is being unable or unwilling to take risks, as if we somehow on the brink of destruction.”

I was especially upset by Bibi’s increasingly use of Holocaust imagery. “Just think of what you’re saying,” I told him. “You’re Prime Minister of the State of Israel, not a rabbi in a shtetl, or a speaker trying to raise funds for Israel abroad. Think of the implications. We’re not in Europe in 1937. Or 1947. If it is a ‘Holocaust,’ what’s our response: to fold up and go back to the diaspora? If Iran gets a bomb, it’ll be bad. Very bad. But we’ll still be here. And we’ll find a way of dealing with the new reality.”

Yet “fortress Israel” was irresistibly comfortable for Bibi politically. I now had to accept that, while he and I had known each other for more than half-a-century, nothing I could do or say was going to change that. With the next Israeli election months away, in January 2013, I confided to Nili, and then to my closest aides, that I was not going to run for a seat in the Knesset. Israeli military action against Iran

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