Israel’s Strategic Challenges

At this time, one the eve of a new calendar year and the start of a new decade, I would like to review the strategic challenges facing the State of Israel. We are celebrating this Hanukkah as a powerful free nation, enjoying – despite the gloomy prophecies and lamentations over the loss of our deterrence – a very peaceful year from a security perspective. In the summer, fall, and winter of 2009, not a single soldier or civilian was killed in an act of hostility or terrorism, an unprecedented phenomenon in recent decades.