The whole country is uneasily aware that Iran has giant rockets to fire back at Tel Aviv and Haifa in retaliation, and that it has armed its ally Hezbollah in Lebanon with Scuds and similar medium-range missiles, weapons it didn’t have in 2006.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the combative prime minister who keeps a portrait of Winston Churchill in his office, last week called an election in January which will be dominated by the Iran question. Victory at the polls, of which he looks sure, will give him a strong mandate to send in Israel’s pilots, the country’s greatest heroes, to drop bunker-busting bombs. To many voters it looks as if it is only American pressure that is stopping him from giving that order.
“The prime minister thinks that at this point in Jewish history responsibility for the safety and security of the Jewish people is on his shoulders,” his spokesman Mark Regev told The Sunday Telegraph.
Debate inside Israel about the decision has been agonised and at times ferocious. The civilian leadership may give the impression it is champing at the bit, but the strongest opposition to a strike has been from Israel’s security establishment.
Meir Dagan, the former head of Mossad, called the idea a “stupid thing” last year, and others have stressed that Israel may lack the firepower to cause fatal damage to the nuclear programme, and that attacking – and perhaps failing – would rally support to the Tehran regime at home and set the Middle East ablaze.
Last week Netanyahu government pushing forward its informal deadline for action into next spring – the latest of many “last chances” to stop Iran’s bomb.
But although the threat has hung over Israel for years, fear is growing as Iran’s nuclear clock ticks and little diplomatic progress is made on stopping it.
The theoretical danger of war is starting to look real. Bomb shelters are being made ready in apartment blocks and gas masks collected from post offices – the official supplier.
Residents of the biggest city Tel Aviv, which lacks bomb shelters for perhaps half its population, are going to have to use underground car parks, or just hope for the best. Schools are holding emergency drills – one father said his six-year-old came home asking why Iranians don’t like Israelis – and a television puppet called Moishe Oofnik explains homeland security to young children.
Matan Vilnai, the home defence minister, speculated in August that 500 Israelis could die in a 30-day war following an air strike, with 1,000 rockets landing each day on the land of Israel. But everyone knows this is only a guess and they wonder if the cost could be higher.
Like most of his compatriots Mr Bloom fears a replay of the war he fled with his family in 2006.
He moved to Israel from Westcliff in Essex when he was 14, fighting in the bloody Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s which was launched to clear out the Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s rocket sites.
He is filled with dread at the thought that his own children may soon have to go through a similar experience, starting when the oldest, Lilah, joins the army next year after her 18th birthday. “War is horrible. I learnt that in Lebanon,” he said.
His other daughter Dana, 15, has only a few years to wait before doing her compulsory military service while Ron, eight, is at an age when he thinks the bomb shelters are great adventure playgrounds.
There are 14 of them, ugly, concrete and squat, dotted around the landscape of tennis courts and lawns at their home in Kibbutz Amiad, a pleasant community of avocado growers.
Since 2006 the northern region has enjoyed a time of peace that it has rarely seen since 1948. Tourism has really taken off and businesses like wineries are doing an excellent trade in the green rolling hills north of the Sea of Galilee. All this could be ruined in a rain of high explosive.
But what Israelis really dread is the prospect of Iran getting nuclear weapons. “We’re a small country, about the size of Wales. They only need to drop four or five Hiroshima-sized bombs and there won’t be many of us left,” said Mr Bloom.
“I don’t think ordinary Iranians hate Jews but their president Ahmadinejad does. When he opens his mouth, he might as well have a little moustache and a slanty haircut.
“It’s a tough one for us, difficult to know what Israel should do. Israel has always fought preventative wars, and when you have this nutter threatening us you hope for a diplomatic solution. But can we wait?”
A terrifying homemade film imaging what could happen if Iran gets the bomb has made many Israelis question whether they should wait.
Israel’s Last Day, viewed half a million times on Youtube, imagines a young couple driving to her mother’s home during an Iranian air attack when nuclear bombs explode. The five-minute film, made with amateur actors for extra realism, and computer-generated mushroom clouds, is a nightmarish vision from video-editor Ronen Barany, 33.
“I wanted to produce something shocking, to wake people up,” he said at his home outside Jerusalem. “It took Hitler six years to kill six million Jews. It would take Ahmadinejad six minutes.” Mr Barany, a father of two, was born in Romania. Many of his relatives died at Auschwitz.
He does not relish the prospect of a new war and hopes that diplomacy will end Iran’s nuclear programme. If that fails he thinks an American attack would be the best option.
“I don’t fully trust America though – in the end Israelis can’t trust anybody except ourselves,” he said.
He is sure that Israelis are coming round to the necessity of an air raid on Iran. “Two years ago nobody wanted to think about this. But today people worry that Iran is capable of doing something crazy. The fear is that the fanatics will do one last terrible thing when their regime is dying. People are starting to say, ‘let’s do something before it is too late’. We had one Holocaust. We don’t want another one.”
His Israeli friends who have joint citizenship with another country are starting to get foreign passports up to date, he said.
If Iran gets a bomb, there is a haunting fear that families will start leaving Israel for greater safety abroad, perhaps crippling an economy that has been roaring along in recent years.
For that reason alone many Israelis believe an Iranian bomb would be impossible to live with. Michael Herzog, a retired Brigadier-General and former Chief of Staff, said: “If Iran is not stopped by sanctions and the US is not going to do anything, it is very possible the current leadership will decide on a strike – and do not underestimate Israel’s capacity to do real damage to the nuclear programme.
“Israelis have to take the threat more seriously than Europeans and Americans. We are much nearer to Iran. And given the nature of that regime, how can anyone believe in containing Iran?”
Rocket attacks on Israel that would follow an airstrike, coupled with Iranian-backed terror attacks around the world, would be a challenge, but not a doomsday scenario, he said.
“In the end this is going to be extremely difficult, the toughest decision that an Israeli prime minister has had to take since the inception of Israel in 1948.”
The government is starting to stress the lesson from history of 1981, when Israeli jets struck an Iraqi reactor in Operation Babylon – against the advice of Mossad. Ronald Reagan was furious. But Saddam Hussein never got the bomb he wanted. Syria’s nuclear programme was also ended by an Israeli air strike in 2007.
By no means all Israelis support the option of a strike on Iran. Opinion polls in the past couple of years have shown only a minority in favour, although support has grown as the danger or Iranian nuclear weapons becomes more imminent..
One Israeli couple, teachers Michal Tamir and Ronny Edry, have started a campaign called “Israel loves Iran” to try to remind Israelis that their enemies are human, and to reassure Iranians.
They have paid for a poster on 70 Tel Aviv buses with the slogan: “Iranians: we will never bomb your country” and say nearly 30,000 Iranians “like” their FaceBook page. Ms Tamir said: “These are people with families. They are as afraid for their children as I am for mine.”
The campaign, the most high-profile peace campaign in Israel at the moment, is critical of Mr Netanyahu’s “macho” approach to the crisis, and claims the Israeli government is playing a game of fear.
But Mr Edry, an army veteran like everyone else in the country, admits that he is worried about the danger from an Iranian bomb, and he does not think Israel should rule out a strike on Iran.
“It’s a tough one. We live in the Middle East, not Switzerland. But for me it is a last resort, not something you should wish for.”
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