The reaction of Israeli political leaders to the news of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 anticipated that the American public, as well as its policymakers, would now be better able to empathize with Israel’s vulnerability to random terrorist attacks against civilians. But a spate of Israeli pronouncements also drew upon a decade of Israeli assertions of Iranian complicity in terrorist attacks, and warnings of an imminent Iranian nuclear threat. A war of civilizations had begun, in which Islamic fundamentalist forces had launched what was just their first strike on September 11. The next might be a nuclear attack by Iran.