In a Sept. 20 Al-Monitor article, Mazal Mualem argued that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the UN General Assembly the day before had restored the Iranian nuclear threat to the top of the agenda. This begs one question: Whose agenda?

The agenda of the major world powers is currently dominated by North Korea and its bizarre leader, Kim Jung-un, who enjoys flaunting his country’s nuclear and ballistic capabilities and the coupling of the two. Echoes of Netanyahu’s aggressive speech against Iran were drowned out by the blustery exchange of insults between the North Korean dictator and the hotheaded president of the United States, Donald Trump.

One can safely assume that fear of an Iranian nuclear bomb has not influenced the agenda of the Israel Police investigators and the state prosecutors engaged in various probes of suspected corruption involving the prime minister and his top associates. Most important, the marked absence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from Netanyahu’s address did not wipe it off the agenda of the Western and Arab worlds nor off the State of Israel’s agenda, and justly so. The United States and its allies in the Middle East are still paying the price for the last time the Israelis, with Netanyahu in the lead, left their imprint on the international agenda.

In September 2002, Netanyahu warned members of the US Congress against an Iraqi nuclear threat. “There is no question whatsoever that Saddam [Hussein] is seeking, is working, is advancing towards the development of nuclear weapons,” said Netanyahu, then a private citizen testifying as an expert after his first stint as prime minister. “It is not serious to assume that this man, who 20 years ago was very close to producing an atomic bomb, spent the last 20 years sitting on his hands.”