In the weeks leading up to his trip to New York, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu devotedly prepared the fine details of the speech he would deliver before the UN General Assembly on Oct 1. At his request, he received intelligence — primarily technological — that shows Iran is only a few months away from achieving its goal of a nuclear bomb. Netanyahu’s goal was to publicly expose and shame Iran in the eyes of the world, so that the other nations would not be deceived by Tehran’s “smile offensive.”

Netanyahu writes his own speeches, especially when it comes to such an important speech, on a topic that stands at the top of his agenda as prime minister. He writes by hand, erases, changes, rewrites and so on until the result is satisfactory. The prime minister’s “bomb speech” at last year’s General Assembly, which he labored on for months, is considered a highlight of his long-standing public diplomacy campaign to stop the Iranian nuclear program.

When he began to work on the new speech, Netanyahu hoped to recreate that success. Unfortunately, last year’s successful rhetoric failed him this year. Netanyahu came prepared for the war that was, instead of the war to come. ''Rouhani didn't sound like Ahmadinejad,'' Netanyahu told the General Assembly, ''but when it comes to Iran's nuclear weapons program, the only difference between them is this: Ahmadinejad was the wolf in wolf's clothing. Rouhani is a wolf in sheep's clothing."

These are indeed sharp words, but they are spoken at a time when the United States and Iran are both offering historic diplomatic gestures to one another, hoping to restore trust between the sides, so that the new diplomacy of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, with its conciliatory tone, has made Israel’s public relations ammunition irrelevant and ineffective.