Thirty years ago, when I was promoted to a new position in the Israeli Defense Forces, I sent all my friends a note promising to do this and that, and more. Most of them responded with “Good luck” or something of the sort, except for one, Uri Talmor, who wrote words which I’ll never forget: “Speak in cents, act in dollars.”

These words seem to be most relevant today, when Israeli officials are saturating the public discourse with declarations about Iran. Defense Minister Ehud Barak, in a lecture he gave in Herzliya recently, spoke at length about the need to act now. “Whoever argues that it’s better to act later,” he said, “might find out that it’s too late.” Former Mossad Chief Meir Dagan, on the other hand, doesn’t miss a chance to explain why we shouldn’t act militarily, while at the same time NBC, obviously tipped by anonymous Israeli sources, laid out in great detail a possible Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to restrain his talkative ministers, he himself contributed to this unhealthy rhetoric, by equating the present situation to Munich 1938, implying that Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was today’s Hitler, and that we shouldn’t repeat the mistake of not acting in time to curb a dictator’s evil schemes. The Iranians responded to what they perceived as Israeli threats by suggesting a preemptive strike, and so the exchange of fighting words continues, threatening at any moment to shift from words to fighting.

I served as a spokesman under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and things were different then. Maybe because Rabin himself had learned the hard way how words could inflame an already loaded situation between Israel and its enemies.

It was Hebrew New Year’s Eve in 1966 when Rabin, then chief of staff of the IDF, gave the traditional interview to the Army magazine, Bamachane. Things had been rough between Israel and Syria for some years, over the use of water, border skirmishes and Syrian support of Palestinian terrorism. Rabin, however, added fuel to the flames. “The situation between Israel and Syria is different [from that between Israel and Egypt and Jordan],” he said, “and requires a different mode of action . . . directed against the perpetrators and against the regime that supports them.”

Upon hearing that his chief of staff had openly threatened to do nothing short of toppling the Syrian regime, then-Prime Minister Levy Eshkol, who had been desperately trying to solve the conflict in diplomatic channels, became so furious that he considered firing him. Then the Six-Day War broke out, Rabin became its victorious hero and the incident was forgotten. Not by Rabin, though.

Years later, in January 1995, the Islamic Jihad carried out a most vicious attack in Beit Lydd, when a Palestinian suicide bomber, dressed in army uniform, blew himself up in the midst of IDF soldiers waiting for their transportation. When the rescue forces rushed to the area, another suicide bomber blew himself up, adding to the carnage. Rabin, then prime minister in his second term, came to inspect the gruesome scene, not knowing that a third suicide bomber, who had been waiting specifically for him, failed to carry out his deadly mission.