Last Friday, Islamic State’s “Sinai Province” carried out a carefully planned terror attack on a Sufi mosque, killing over 300 worshippers. Examining its motivations, Yoram Schweitzer and Ofir Winter ask whether the attack will lead to a shift in how the Egyptian regime pursues its campaign against both Islamic State (IS) and the other terrorist groups operating within its borders:

From [IS’s] perspective, the attack was designed to serve several operational and ideological goals: first, to project a show of its strength at a time [when the organization] is being trounced in Iraq and Syria and challenged by competing terrorist groups (Egypt and Sinai are [also] home to groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood); second, to humiliate the Egyptian regime by portraying it to domestic and international publics as helpless, and to deal another blow to its efforts to rebuild the nation’s economy and tourist industry; third, to settle a score [with] locals cooperating with the regime’s struggle against terrorism . . . and to deter other groups from doing the same; fourth, to torpedo the understandings reached over the last year between the Egyptian regime and Hamas about increased supervision of the Gaza-Sinai border and opening the Rafah crossing [connecting Gaza to Egypt]; and, finally, to harm the believers in Sufism, seen by some Salafist jihadist groups as heretics who have deviated from the true path of Sunni Islam and are therefore subject to the death penalty. . . .

The increasing number of attacks in Sinai has forced the Egyptian regime to embark on a series of military operations against the jihadists, but despite the military efforts, attacks have continued unabated in the peninsula, taking a steep human toll, in particular of police and army personnel. . . . While the expanding Egyptian campaign against terrorism in Sinai succeeded in 2017 in eliminating many terrorists and senior leaders and reducing the number of attacks overall, the attacks that were carried out have become more focused and deadly. . . .

Egypt must make radical changes in how it fights terrorism in general and in Sinai in particular. The Egyptian security services are in urgent need of reorganization, closer coordination, and increased cooperation [among themselves].

[Furthermore, Egypt must have] high-quality, accurate intelligence, which makes it possible to target elements planning, assisting, and perpetrating the terrorism in a focused way, and distinguishing them from the population at large. This distinction is critical to reducing the civilian population’s motivation to cooperate with the terrorists and encourage the locals to help the authorities actively fight terrorism.

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.