JERUSALEM (JTA) —The timing of the Iranian president's latest fulmination against Israel was particularly auspicious.

Speaking from the podium of the Durban II conference in Geneva on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Israel a "racist" state, prompting sharp rebukes from around the world and a not-so-veiled threat from Jerusalem.

"We will not allow Holocaust deniers to perpetrate another Holocaust against the Jewish people," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said several hours afterward in his speech at Israel's main Holocaust memorial ceremony in Jerusalem. "This is the supreme duty of the State of Israel and my supreme duty as prime minister."

Netanyahu's remarks were a reminder of the seriousness with which Israel views Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons: Many Israelis see Ahmadinejad as a modern-day Hitler.

"Seventy-three years after the Berlin Olympiad, yesterday the world saw the return of Adolf Hitler," Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin said Tuesday.

"This time he is bearded and he talks Persian. But the words are the same words, the goals the same goals and the resolve to use effective means to achieve them is the same threatening resolve."

The Israeli government says it cannot allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons capable of obliterating the Jewish state, and the comments from Israeli officials on Holocaust Memorial Day were a reminder that Israel could resort to military action to enforce that view.

In response, Iran's parliament speaker, Ali Larijani, warned Tuesday that if Israel dared to attack his country, its retaliation would be "beyond imagination."

The tough Israeli stance against Ahmadinejad's verbal assault - the Iranian leader said that after World War II, "on the pretext of Jewish suffering," they "sent migrants from Europe, the United States and the rest of the world to set up a totally racist government in occupied Palestine" - was part of a calculated response to Durban II that has been two years in the making.

If the main conference organizers - Libya, Iran, Egypt, Cuba and Pakistan - had hoped to carry on the Israel-bashing spree they launched at the first U.N. conference against racism in Durban, South Africa, in 2001, they would be disappointed.

After the humiliating public relations beating it took in Durban eight years ago, Israel adopted a two-pronged strategy to prevent a repetition at the follow-up parley in Geneva.

To deny the conference legitimacy and moral authority, it decided to press for a high-profile boycott. To prevent untrammeled Israel-bashing outside the main conference building, it backed a strong pro-Israel street presence.

On the first two days of the conference, both aspects of the strategy seemed to be working. Several countries - the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland - followed Israel's lead in boycotting the proceedings, and then the Czechs joined the boycott.

Israel also recalled its ambassador to Switzerland to protest Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz's meeting with Ahmadinejad.

Meanwhile, pro-Israel advocacy groups put a full-court press into action.

Afterward, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who had remained seated throughout Ahmadinejad's address, issued a strong and unusual condemnatory statement: "I deplore the use of this platform by the Iranian president to accuse, divide and even incite."