Even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s opponents were forced to admit that his Sept. 19 speech before the UN General Assembly in New York was a true masterpiece. It was a polished performance that included all the elements on which Netanyahu built his leadership: national pride, reprimanding non-Jews and Israel’s enemies, preaching ethics to the entire globe, and even quite a few punchlines that coaxed smiles and even ripples of laughter from the audience. But above all this in importance, the Iran issue was supreme.

Two years after the signing of the nuclear agreement between Iran and the P5+1, Netanyahu has brought the nuclear threat back to center stage. Or at least, he is trying to do so. An end-of-the-Jewish-year poll by Maariv newspaper showed that contrary to last year, when Iran did not appear on the list of threats that worry the average Israeli, the issue has clearly made a comeback, thanks to Netanyahu. In the poll, Iran lags behind on the list of threats with only 4% support, but this is only the beginning. We can count on Netanyahu that by next year, Iran will occupy a much-advanced place at the top of the list of important strategic threats to the existence of the Jewish state.

Netanyahu’s speech came after his historic tour of Latin American countries, which no other Israeli prime minister had ever officially visited. The visit with its various official receptions was leveraged by Netanyahu’s associates and widely displayed in the media. Even his trip to New York for the UN General Assembly meeting was part of a well-thought-out strategy in which Netanyahu presented himself as a rare super-diplomat, to which all the world’s palaces are open and for whom the leaders of the free world wait in line to see. After all, he is the only one able to invite himself over to Russian President Vladimir Putin on short notice, to call President Donald Trump “my friend” and to mix with European leaders to his heart’s content.

During the Jewish New Year (right after the Latin American tour and the UN speech), the foreign media announced that Israel had conducted another assault on Syrian territory against ammunition stockpiles intended for Hezbollah. Immediately after the holiday, Haartz newspaper published that Netanyahu revealed to his Cabinet ministers on Sept. 24 that Trump’s peace initiative is alive and well. All those who eulogized the president’s bombastic peace declarations and believed that Israel was facing a calm, quiet period, free of annoying peace issues was mistaken. Senior White House adviser Jared Kushner, despite internal political problems in the United States, continues to diligently work on the peace program. The indefatigable US envoy Jason Greenblatt is expected to return again soon to the region, for a series of additional talks.