With the recent fall of the Syrian city of Raqqa, Islamic State’s de-facto capital, and the organization’s collapse in Iraq this summer, it has now been deprived of its territorial base. But Islamic State (IS) is far from extinguished elsewhere. Its Sinai branch demonstrated this on Sunday by firing rockets into populated areas of southern Israel and attacking Egyptian military positions on the peninsula. Ron Ben-Yishai comments:

These two operations . . . had two [primary] purposes: first, to demonstrate that despite being beaten in its strongholds in Syria and Iraq and being driven out them, IS is still alive and kicking; and second, to disrupt Hamas’s reconciliation agreement with Fatah and its tightening relations with Egypt.

Both the reconciliation agreement between the two Palestinian organizations, and mainly the cooperation agreement with Egypt, contradict IS’s interests. The rocket fire into Israel, in the Gaza vicinity, is therefore aimed at raising the tensions and perhaps leading to an escalation and an active military conflict between the Gazan terror organization and Israel. [Yet] another purpose of the operation is to attract activists who are fleeing Syria and Iraq and looking for a new area of activity.

Under its new leader in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar, Hamas prefers to ease the Gazans’ distress and reach agreements with Egypt and . . . Mahmoud Abbas rather than continue its alliance [with IS]. That is the reason Sinwar has stepped up the security measures in the Philadelphi Route [connecting Egypt and Gaza] and is preventing IS people from moving in and out of the Strip. He is also arresting activists of IS-affiliated organizations within Gaza quite intensively. As a result, IS feels the need to act against the enemies of its Sinai branch—Egypt, which is fighting the organization with [still] insufficient success, and Hamas, which is currently cooperating with Egypt in a bid to ease the lives of the Strip’s residents. . ..

What happened Sunday night possibly marks the beginning of a relocation of Islamic State’s main military activity from Syria and Iraq to the Sinai. The Israeli defense establishment is already preparing for this possibility.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.