UNITED NATIONS – With increased wariness toward Iran’s nuclear program, European and American officials reacted angrily yesterday to President Ahmadinejad’s denial of the Holocaust and his suggestion that Israel’s Jewish population be moved to America or Europe.

Iran watchers in Israel said the latest outburst may have been a strategic move. Far from arbitrary statements by an erratic and inexperienced leader, they said, the rhetoric coming out of Tehran could be part of a calculated attempt to push the nuclear diplomacy to a brink, or to force Israel to military escalation.

The West has “fabricated a myth under the name ‘massacre of the Jews,’ and they hold it higher than God himself, religion itself, and the prophets themselves,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said yesterday in his country’s southeastern Sistan-Baluchestan province, according to news agencies quoting his speech, aired live yesterday on Iranian state-run television.

“If you say and insist it’s true that you killed 6 million Jews in crematoria during World War II, then why should the Palestinians pay for that?” Mr. Ahmadinejad added. “Our proposal is that you give a piece of your land in Europe, the U.S., Canada, or Alaska. If you do that, the Iranian people will no longer protest against you.”

Speaking from Jerusalem, an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mark Regev, told The New York Sun, “The combination of extremist ideology, a warped understanding of reality, and nuclear weapons is a combination that no one in the international community can accept.”

“At some point there has to be a level of embarrassment for the people of Iran at what the man says,” America’s U.N. ambassador, John Bolton, told the Sun, referring to Mr., Ahmadinejad. “I think these statements show that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear threat is not hypothetical,” he added. “Nuclear weapons in the hands of someone like that is a serious threat.”

In Washington, a State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said, “Certainly the patience, I would expect the patience of the EU-3 and other members of that negotiation, is not infinite.”

The board of directors of the International Atomic Energy Agency so far has declined to turn the Iranian issue over to the U.N. Security Council, which could impose sanctions. Germany, France, and Britain, known as the European Three, have led the diplomatic talks, which now seem to have reached their end and might be replaced by more muscular diplomacy, or even military action.

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s statements “are certainly shocking and unacceptable,” Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said. “I cannot deny that they may weigh on our bilateral relations and naturally also on the chances for the negotiations on [Iran’s] so-called nuclear dossier,” he told reporters in Berlin, according to Reuters.

The Israel Defense Force’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, told the Knesset’s foreign and security committee on Tuesday that Iran’s nuclear weapons program will reach the “point of no return” by March. Israeli critics called General Halutz’s wording vague.

The IAEA chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, recently said that once the enrichment process begins, Iran could be months away from achieving weapons capabilities. However, General Halutz, a former air force commander, may have been talking about the last point in time that Israel can address the nuclear issue militarily. Once uranium is introduced to a plant such as Natanz in Iran, any attempt to bomb it from the air would spread radioactivity that could be destructive to a wide area.

The term “point of no return” in the same sense was used by Prime Minister Begin in 1981 to justify the timing of Israel’s bombing of the Osirak plant in Iraq.

An Israeli scholar of Farsi culture, Menashe Amir, told the Sun yesterday that Iranians like Mr. Ahmadinejad might be pushing for an Israeli air attack on Iran, which could allow them to argue that they need atomic weapons to defend themselves. He noted that last month Iran attempted to involve Israel in a large-scale military confrontation in Lebanon, using its proxy terrorist organization there, Hezbollah.

When he said in October that Israel should be “wiped off the map,” Mr. Ahmadinejad added that this was only the first step in a larger plan to bring the West to its knees, Mr. Amir added. Mr. Ahmadinejad and his supporters “are attempting to steal the limelight from bin Laden and Zarqawi,” he said, referring to the Al Qaeda leaders.

He said that this was also the reason for the mullahs’ attempt to escalate the diplomatic language. Seeing the world as a clash between the West and Islam, they hoped for confrontation that could hasten victory, he said.