Netanyahu, who fought hijackers hand-to-hand on an El Al plane in 1972, blew up civilian aircraft on a night raid into Beirut in 1968, and fought in several wars, has never exhibited a jot of compassion towards Palestinians. I interviewed him over several days 1992, at the very beginning of his rise to power within Israel. He was 42, a mere deputy minister, with a gift for putting the hardline Israeli positions of then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir into telegenic soundbites. His ambition to be prime minister was clear: his chances, at the time, less so. When I interviewed his colleagues, I learned he had alienated many – the foreign minister under whom he served hated him, his former mentor, Moshe Arens, belittled his abilities, his relations with the US state department were awful (as they have mostly continued to be, with brief exceptions during the administrations of George W. Bush and Donald Trump). But his Manichean world view turned out to suit the times, as Israel’s two competing ideologies underwent a power-shift.

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The first ideology, that of the left-leaning Labor movement, created the Israel with which the West fell in love – the Exodus land of egalitarian, Paul Newman-esque sabras and Holocaust survivors, tilling soil, beset by enemies, yet dreaming of peace. The other ideology, the Revisionists, believed that Jews were entitled to all the land of the former British ruled Palestine, including what is now Jordan. In 1946, they blew up the British headquarters in the King David hotel, and in 1948 they assassinated a UN peace negotiator and massacred Palestinian civilians in the village of Deir Yassin. They found a home in the Likud party and came to power in 1977 under Menachem Begin. Since then, Israeli public opinion has moved right to meet them, accelerated by Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles, the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada and, until recently, the world’s – including the Gulf Arabs’ – seeming willingness to forget the Palestinians and the issues of a half-century’s immiserating occupation.

Hamas’s blood-soaked attack exposed the cost of that amnesia, at its own horrific price. Just as Hamas knew the attack on Israeli civilians would provoke a hellacious response, so Netanyahu knew that Iran would respond to its lethal and lawless consulate strike. And just as Hamas had no regard for the Palestinian suffering that would ensue, so Netanyahu took an unconscionable risk with the lives of Israelis.

Now, he seems deaf to the world’s entreaties against escalation. And we wait, helplessly, to see what risk he will take next.