"It's 1938, and Iran is Germany," Benjamin Netanyahu said this week, in a speech to the North American Jewish community.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Netanyahu continued, "is preparing another Holocaust for the Jewish state."

If Netanyahu is right, and there is little solid evidence to the contrary, the scenario is all too familiar. Iranian defense officials have laid it out again and again - an attack, either American or Israeli, against Iran's nuclear facilities. Either way, Tehran responds with a devastating onslaught against Israel.

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How devastating?

"If the Zionist regime commits such stupidity, the response by the Iranian military will be swift, strong and crushing," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammed Ali Hosseini said this week, referring to a possible Israeli strike. "Iran will take no longer than a second to respond."

This, from the one country in all the world whose president has explicitly called for another nation to be "erased."

But Tehran cannot consider a nuclear holocaust against Israel without taking into account those whom Iran holds to be rightful Muslim heirs to Muslim land. The Islamic republic cannot erase the State of Israel without killing large numbers of the very people whose lives it has sworn to protect: the Palestinians.

There was a time, not so long ago, when many Israelis believed that no Arab power would attack Jerusalem, for fear of damaging the holy sites sacred to Islam. Moreover, there was a feeling that Arab powers would refrain from attacking both the holy city and the territories, in order to avoid Palestinian casualties.

But long-held taboos governing the actions of Muslim fighters have been bent, broken and discarded with impunity in recent years. In Iraq, the February bombing of the Al-Askari mosque, one of the holiest of all shrines to Shi'ites ? apparently at the hands of an Al-Qaida cell - was followed within a day by reprisal attacks on no fewer than 161 Sunni mosques.

Where Islamists once refrained from killing non-combatants, especially Muslims, the number of Muslim non-combatants killed in Iraq has grown so astronomically as to resist accurate count.

During the recent war in the north, nearly half of the Israeli civilians killed by Katyusha rockets fired by Iran's client militia Hezbollah, were Arabs.

Under certain circumstances, might Iran sacrifice the Arabs of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, to say nothing of a million Muslim Israeli citizens, in a cataclysmic assault on the Zionist entity?

More directly, would Iran be willing to kill off millions of Arabs if that were the price of exterminating the state of Israel?

The truth, one wishes, were "No." But the real truth, one suspects, is "Not yet."

In recent decades, radical changes in warfare and radical re-interpretations of Koranic law suggest a growing willingness among Islamic extremists, clerics at their head, to justify the killing of Muslim bystanders in a suicide bombing.

In the phrase of New York University Prof. Noah Feldman, writing in the New York Times Magazine last month, the prevailing ideology of suicide bombing holds that the "involuntary martyrdom" of Muslim bystanders killed in a suicide bombing is viewed as "no less glorious for being unintentional."

In the future, Feldman notes, "the logic of sacrificing other Muslims against their own wills could be extended to the national level."

Were an Islamic state to use nuclear weapons against Israel or other Western targets, "the guaranteed retaliation would cost the lives of thousands and maybe millions of Muslims. But following the logic of suicide bombing, the original bomber might reason that those Muslims would die in God's grace and that others would live on to fight the jihad."

Feldman stresses that no state in the Muslim world has adopted this view. "But after 9/11," he adds, "we can no longer treat the possibility as fanciful."

A number of analysts have suggested that at present, the most effective deterrent to a large-scale Iranian attack on Israel, is Iran's fundamental wish to continue to survive.

Although Shi'ite positions and those of Ahmadinejad are seen as more potentially apocalyptic that those of Osama Bin Laden and of the Sunnis, the cagey Iranian regime has played the rest of the world with the skill and the outlook of a poker master who wants to stay in the game for good.

Should future events take a turn for the very worst, however, and an all-out Iranian attack on the Holy Land appear imminent, perhaps Tehran will issue the kind of recommendation to Palestinians that Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah delivered to Haifa's Arab population during the war - warning them to leave town so that Hezbollah gunners could step up rocket attacks without shedding the blood of fellow Muslims.

"I have a special message to the Arabs of Haifa, to your martyrs and to your wounded. I call on you to leave this city. I hope you do this," Nasrallah said.

"Please leave so we don't shed your blood, which is our blood."