WASHINGTON – A week that began with a blistering denunciation by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of Iranian duplicity ended with diminished prospects for Israel to take direct action to address Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

“The Israelis find themselves in a far worse position now than they have been for several years,” concluded Elliott Abrams, a leading neo-conservative who served as George W. Bush’s main Middle East adviser, in Foreign Affairs.

While Israel could still attack Iran’s nuclear sites on its own, “[i]ts ability to do so is already being narrowed considerably by the diplomatic thaw” between Iran and the United States, Abrams wrote. “It is one thing to bomb Iran when it appears hopelessly recalcitrant and isolated and quite another to bomb it when much of the world – especially the United States – is optimistic about the prospects of talks.”

Abrams’ assessment was widely shared among his ideological comrades who believe Israel will be the big loser if hopes for détente between Washington and Tehran gather steam after next week’s meeting in Geneva between Iran and the P5+1 (the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China plus Germany).

The Weekly Standard, a neo-conservative publication, described Israel’s position as “Standing Alone,” the title of its lead editorial at week’s end, although its authors, editor-in-chief William Kristol and the director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Michael Makovsky, took a far more defiant tone than Abrams. They urged Netanyahu to follow through on his latest threats to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities with or without U.S. approval.

“No one likes the truth-telling skunk at the appeasement party,” they wrote, asserting that President Barack Obama’s “soft-headed, even desperate, desire for some sort of [nuclear] deal, any deal” with Iran comprised the kind of Western “failure of nerve and a collapse of will” that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill decried with the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Similarly, the Wall Street Journal‘s chief foreign affairs columnist, Bret Stephens, complained bitterly about the situation confronting Israel in the wake of Rouhani’s U.N. tour de force the previous week.

“Israel is now in the disastrous position of having to hope that Iranian hard-liners sabotage Mr. Rouhani’s efforts to negotiate a deal,” he wrote just before Netanyahu took the podium to denounce Tehran’s perfidy.

The Israeli leader, he complained, had already deferred far too much to Obama’s diplomatic efforts by not attacking Iran last year. Given Washington’s “retreat from the world” – most recently demonstrated by its failure to deliver on threats to attack Syria – the Israelis should “downgrad[e] relations with Washington,” he demanded, and now “must proceed without regard to Mr. Obama’s diplomatic timetable.”

Gary Sick, an Iran expert who served on the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan, told IPS that neoconservatives’ recent outpouring of defiance and despair constituted “the most convincing evidence I have seen to date that the die-hard supporters of sabotaging an agreement between the U.S. and Iran are in full defensive mode.”

Diplomatic milestones

A week before Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif is expected to sit down with his P5+1 interlocutors in Geneva, Netanyahu and supporters in Washington face a diplomatic and political environment distinctly different from that of just five weeks ago.

That environment is defined above all by a pervasive war-weariness among the U.S. electorate, clearly indicated by strong public support for Obama’s choice of diplomacy over missile strikes to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal.