On Wednesday night, twenty rockets were fired, from Syria, at the Golan Heights by, according to Israel, Iran’s Quds force, a special-forces unit of the Revolutionary Guard. Some got through Israel’s advanced missile-defense shield, but there were no injuries. Israel responded by launching seventy missiles, killing at least twenty-three fighters, including five Syrian troops and eighteen allied militiamen. The Israeli Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said that the I.D.F. had destroyed “nearly all” of Iran’s military infrastructure in Syria. The Iranian attack had been expected; for days now, the Israeli media has been full of reports of people on the Golan cleaning out their shelters. On April 9th, Israel reportedly attacked the T-4 Syrian Air Force base near Homs. Seven members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, who had apparently been establishing an airbase, complete with anti-aircraft batteries, were killed. Last week, Israel reportedly bombed a major cache of Iranian missiles north of Hama, in Syria. “Everyone knows Israel has conducted over a hundred such attacks,” the veteran Syrian analyst Charles Glass told me in a telephone conversation from London. Iran threatened retaliation, which came last night.

The attacks and counterattacks came just a couple of days after President Trump’s announcement, on Tuesday, that the United States was withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—the Iran nuclear deal. The stories are often reported separately, but they should not be. The withdrawal is a part of a larger story, possibly a larger strategy, which began with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s surprise presentation at the Defense Ministry, in Tel Aviv, on April 30th. Its purpose was ostensibly to persuade the Trump Administration to confront a long-term nuclear threat to Israel. Its more plausible purpose was to prompt Trump to confront an immediate conventional threat. After Trump’s announcement, Israel attacked Kiswah, south of Damascus—again, an act designed to thwart Iran from firing rockets from Syria at northern Israel. Eight Iranians were reported to be among the fifteen killed.

Netanyahu, at his press conference, claimed to expose “something that the world has never seen before,” Iranian documents—“fifty-five thousand pages, another fifty-five thousand files on one hundred-and eighty-three CDs”—secured by Israeli intelligence. The cache showed that Iran had operated a secret nuclear-weapons program from 1999 to 2003, the so-called Project Amad. The J.C.P.O.A., Netanyahu said, presumed that Iran would “come clean” about its past nuclear program, but, he claimed, after signing the deal, in 2015, Iran “intensified its efforts to hide its secret nuclear files.” The inference was clear: “Iran lied, big time”; the regime hid its nuclear files, cataloguing its nuclear knowledge, because it intended “to use them at a later date.” On Tuesday, as if on cue, Trump mirrored Netanyahu’s concern. “At the heart of the Iran deal was a giant fiction: that a murderous regime desired only a peaceful nuclear energy program,” Trump said.

Netanyahu, to seal his claim, provided video clips of Iranian leaders over the years. In one, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said, “The Islamic Republic has never been after nuclear weapons.” President Hassan Rouhani maintained that “nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction have no place in Iran’s security and defense doctrine, and contradict our fundamental religious and ethical convictions.” Another leader claimed that “the source of any idea that we are building a nuclear weapon is specious. . . . We are building . . . a research facility for the purpose of industry, agriculture, medicine, and science—peaceful purposes only.”

Actually, that last statement was from Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, responding, in December, 1960, to reports that had reached President-elect John Kennedy—a known opponent of nuclear proliferation—that Israel was working on a bomb at its reactor, in Dimona. For Israelis, word of covert Iranian work on nuclear weapons could hardly have been shocking. Indeed, Netanyahu’s big reveal was something that the signatories to the J.C.P.O.A. took for granted—that’s why it was negotiated. Netanyahu was showing that Iran could not be trusted, but the deal, as Susan Rice wrote, in the Times, “was never about trust.” It was designed to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to monitor the very sites that Netanyahu’s show-and-tell focussed on; the I.A.E.A. has certified Iranian compliance as recently as March.

Israeli analysts, including Amos Yadlin, the head of the Institute of National Security Studies, said that Netanyahu had not produced anything like proof that Iran was in violation of its commitments. “There is no definitive smoking gun that Iran lied since 2015,” Yadlin told Channel 13. What Netanyahu did justifiably call attention to—though, again, it was nothing new—was Iran’s ballistic-missile program, which the J.C.P.O.A. did not address. A rough consensus has emerged among leading security experts that the missile program and other matters, such as Iran’s support for a Houthi insurgency in Yemen, might well be confronted with new sanctions, which could have been imposed with the J.C.P.O.A. in place. Without the United States, the international coalition that negotiated the deal loses its major player, and Iran loses its major incentive to allow monitoring. If the U.S. imposes sanctions on its own, these will inhibit Western and Chinese companies aiming to invest there, heightening tensions with allies, as well as with Iran. And, if Iran were accused of renewed nuclear efforts—by, say, Israeli intelligence sources—the only option left to the U.S. would be, if not a military one, at least a renewed posture of brinkmanship. Who other than the national-security adviser, John Bolton—who brags that he does not “do carrots,” and has advocated for regime change in Iran—would wish to adopt a posture of military intimidation?

The point is that this posture is precisely what Netanyahu is counting on, given the potential for escalation in Syria and Lebanon, which he does not wish Israel to face alone. Russia is determined to keep Assad in power, promising to supply his regime with advanced and lethal S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to protect against further air- and cruise-missile attacks. The Russians are coördinating with Iran, which has also armed Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah is reputed to have a hundred and forty thousand missiles—an increasing number with guidance systems—capable of reaching virtually all parts of Israel (though not nearly that many launchers, a high-level Israeli official assured me). The Iranian government is still demonizing the West, testing ballistic missiles, supporting Shia insurgents in Yemen, funnelling aid to Hamas in Gaza, and welcoming the prospect of the destruction of the “Zionist regime.”

The Netanyahu government, for its part, is both anticipating a crisis and helping to precipitate one. On April 26th, Avigdor Lieberman told the London-based Saudi newspaper Elaph that Israel did not want war, but, if the “Islamic regime” attacks Tel Aviv, Israel “will strike Tehran and destroy every Iranian military site that threatens Israel in Syria, whatever the price.” Lieberman has also insisted that Israel will maintain freedom of operations in Syria and “respond forcefully” to any party there with the capacity “to launch missiles or to attack Israel or even our aircraft.” Not coincidentally, Trump’s abandonment of the nuclear deal means that the U.S. will have to prepare detailed contingency plans for an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, which are spread throughout the country. Meanwhile, the U.S. has been backing Israel’s preëmptive actions in Syria and southern Lebanon.