Strategy Page has an interesting article on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in which it's noted that Israel suffered no Islamic terror attacks within its borders in 2009 - the lowest level of Islamic terrorism in Israel since the Palestinians began their current round of violence in 2000.
Several reasons for this respite are the new tactics adopted by the Israelis to defeat the Palestinian suicide bombing campaign as well as their flexibility in adapting to new Palestinian methods:
The Palestinian terrorist groups still say they are going to destroy Israel. But as a practical matter, the current round of Palestinian terrorist violence is over. You can see this by the sharp decline in successful terrorist attacks, and the frequent pronouncements from the terrorists groups that they are going to behave, for a while anyway (until they can figure out how to bypass Israeli defenses).
What the terrorists really want is to avoid any more of the Israeli tactics that shut down their terrorist operations. This included going after terrorist leaders and technical specialists, and either capturing or (failing that) killing them. Raids and air attacks were made against buildings used by the terrorists, and tight security on Israelis borders were instituted. This last measure crushed the Palestinian economy, which put popular pressure on the terrorists to stop their attacks, and promise to keep it that way. That hasn't worked, but Israeli counter-terror techniques continue to.
In addition to these tactics Israel has established a very effective intelligence-gathering network in Gaza that allows them to preempt terrorist designs. Police states like Egypt, Algeria and Syria have crushed indigenous terrorist movements within their borders at great cost to innocent bystanders, but it's much harder for a free and open society to extinguish a terrorist threat.
One question this raises is whether the Israeli people would stand for their leaders forfeiting the relative peace they've achieved in order to launch a risky attack on Iran's nuclear weapons program. Such an attack is almost certain to result in war with both Hamas and Hezbollah. But then war with these radical groups dedicated to Israel's destruction is ultimately inevitable anyway.
RLC
