The prevailing perception in Israel is that of being surrounded by formidable non-nuclear threats, and dangerously weakened by the poor capacity of the state’s domestic front to sustain a long conventional war. A country that in the summer of 2006 had to send a million of its citizens to underground shelters to escape massive ballistic warfare conducted by a non-state agent, Hezbollah, now faces an “Islamic Awakening” that it cannot fully fathom, and, with it, an ominous worsening of its strategic environment.