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Netanyahu has made four small videos addressing the Iranian people over the last three months.

For five days, since the Iranian protesters first took to the streets on Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said nothing about the demonstrations.

For five days he held his tongue and asked his cabinet ministers to do the same, believing that anything anybody with authority in Israel would say about the protests would and could be used against the Iranians who took to the streets.

Foremost in the minds of some who advocated this policy was the results of Israel’s very public support in September of independence for Iraqi Kurds. Rather than lead other countries to express similar support, or do much more than giving some moral support to the Kurds themselves, these statements were used by Iraq, by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and by Iran against the Kurds.

Seeking to avoid a replay, Netanyahu’s policy up until Monday afternoon was just to keep quiet.

But then two things happened. The first was that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani publicly blamed Israel and the US for fomenting the unrest. The second was the deafening silence of the Europeans.

As a result, Netanyahu uploaded a 90-second video in English onto his Facebook page, which was also subtitled in Farsi and placed on his Farsi Facebook page as well, in which he directly addressed both those issues.