Netanyahu warns of a secret attack days after his own secret meeting he wouldn't detail.

…(cont) Sixteen days after that, on September 25, The New York Times corroborated the story anyway: a phone call from the UAE's president, weeks before the attack, carried the warning Netanyahu says he never received. He was warned. He spent three weeks this month calling the people who reported it liars.

Then last week, with the libel threat still open, Netanyahu was in Abu Dhabi, secretly, meeting with — the headline on the report says eight Muslim-majority nations. The report's own text says nine Middle Eastern and North African countries. Nine, then. Either government would say what they discussed if asked; as of Tuesday, neither had. Quiet diplomacy is supposed to be quiet, which is exactly what this was, right up until Israeli media found out anyway.

So the defense holds up fine: a leader who tells the public about the threats he sees, and skips the meetings he holds and the warning he'd already gotten once. It holds up, provided the count of what he didn't disclose never comes up. Twenty-eight days to an election, and the only threat Israelis have confirmed independently is the one from three years ago — the one he spent three weeks this month insisting was "malicious libel."