Weighing up the risks of a second Holocaust

'It's 1938', says former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 'and Iran is Germany, racing to arm itself with atomic bombs.'

Addressing a Jewish audience in Los Angeles last month, Mr Netanyahu was giving voice to a growing sense of alarm in Israel at Iran's seemingly inexorable march towards nuclear capability.

For long an ominous but distant cloud, the Iranian 'bomb' has become for Israel an existential issue of the highest urgency as the international community backs off from confrontation with Tehran, leaving Israel alone in the field.

In his address, Mr Netanyahu referred to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's repeated calls for wiping Israel off the map. 'Believe him and stop him,' said Mr Netanyahu. 'This is what we must do. Everything pales before it.'

The memory of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered, is a central element in Israel's collective consciousness, a memory made more acute by Mr Ahmadinejad's denial that the Holocaust ever happened. Israel last week severely condemned Tehran's conference on the Holocaust as dangerously revisionist. Tehran maintained it was merely a scholarly forum to discuss the Holocaust freely, without the restrictions imposed in many European countries.

A leading Israeli author, Aharon Appelfeld, who survived the Holocaust as a boy, said last month that the Iranian threat was on a scale with that of the Holocaust. 'For the first time since I'm in the country I feel that we face a real existential danger.'

Israel has half assumed, half hoped that if international pressure on Iran to halt its nuclear development fails, the United States would in the end use military force. In recent weeks, however, a war-weary Washington seems to be backing away from a confrontation. In a meeting with French President Jacques Chirac, President George W. Bush said that he would 'understand it' if Israel chose to attack Iran's nuclear installations. To Israelis, that sounded like he would 'prefer it' over an American attack. There was likewise little comfort from Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice's remark that the US lacked sufficient intelligence on Iran's nuclear facilities to carry out a strike.