Islamic State’s Long War Against Israel
A theme in the political warfare against Israel since the Iran/HAMAS pogrom of 7 October 2023 has been the idea that Israel is somehow behind the Islamic State (IS). The accusation, which originates as a piece of Iranian disinformation from a decade ago, is generally made unspecifically. The level of independence IS has from its supposed Jewish puppet-masters varies depending on the narrator: at one end of the spectrum, Israel created IS and maintains a tight hold over it; at the other end, Israel is allied with IS for some political-military goal(s) and provides secret support of some kind.
The primary “evidence” advanced for this thesis is that IS “never” attacks Israel and barely ever even incites against the Jewish State.1 The best disinformation incorporates elements of truth, and the fact that anti-Israel activists are working with in this case is that targeting Israel is not an ideological priority in the IS’s jihad. As we shall see, this has nothing to do with an IS soft spot for Israel. Where the conspiracy theory falls down on its own terms is that IS has not only plotted attacks in Israel—lots of them, over a dozen since the Simchat Torah pogrom—but has carried out multiple “successful” attacks on Israel, the earliest of which dates back much further than many people realise.
ISLAMIC STATE’S IDEOLOGICAL VIEW OF ISRAEL
In 2016, IS set out in Al-Naba, its weekly newsletter, its view that former Mandate Palestine is among “the usurped lands of the Muslims” that must be recovered through jihad to be subsumed into the caliphate, thus jihad against Israel is an eternal obligation, but “the ruling on jihad in Palestine is the same as its ruling elsewhere, without distinction”. In 2021, IS explicitly said in Al-Naba that restoring former Mandate Palestine to Islamic rule is an equal priority to recovering Andalusia (Spain), which spent eight hundred years under Muslim occupation. In short, IS rejects the whole premise that prioritisation in jihad can be differentiated ideologically by geography; the duty is global. However, IS explained in 2016, “If the virtue of the land were to grant preference to jihad therein, then jihad to liberate Mecca and Medina from the hands of the tawaghit [idolatrous rulers who use man-made laws] of Al-Saud would, without doubt, take precedence over all other parts of the earth.”
In the 2016 Naba editorial, IS ferociously criticised the idea that Palestine was “the foremost issue of the Muslims”, saying this was in itself a deviant ideological innovation bordering on idolatry, created by Arab nationalists, which has a cascade of negative concrete consequences, starting with causing Muslims to focus on this one zone to the exclusion of their jihad duties everywhere else. IS further argued that this was not an accident, that the Palestine cause was used by Arab despots to “prevent the Muslims from performing jihad against the idolaters and apostates”, including these rulers. For IS, this was intolerable because “the apostate tawaghit ruling over the lands of Islam are more disbelieving than [the Jews]”.
What infuriates IS is that anyone who plays the Palestine card—even rhetorically, they do not actually have to attack Israel—is rewarded with vast popularity by the Sunni Arab masses, and IS sees this as particularly malevolent since it applies not just with Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood that IS regards as abusing the banner of Islam, pan-Arabists, and Communists, but the Shi’a, the foe IS is most determined to eradicate, and specifically Iran. In IS’s perception, simply fighting the Jews is not enough; it has to be done for the right reason, namely to bring about (its version of) shari’a rule. Fighting to create a Palestinian State or in “revenge due to Israeli abuses in the Palestinian Territories” does not meet IS’s definition of legitimate.
For IS, the ideological and strategic imperatives mesh to dictate a program of eliminating the non-jihadist Muslim governments before Israel. As Israel is protected by Arab buffer States, like Jordan, “it is absolutely impossible to reach the stage of fighting the Jews without first eliminating these tawaghit”, Al-Naba said in 2016. Once the Arab regimes have been conquered by the jihadists, Israel will be surrounded and the task of finishing it off will be easier.
The only way geography can be allowed to factor into jihad, according to IS, is as follows: “fighting these Jews is an obligation upon every Muslim. But this obligation is more binding upon the people of Jerusalem due to their proximity to it—provided that the objective of this fighting is the establishment of the deen of Allah, and not merely the recovery of land and wealth or revenge for the crimes of the Jews over the past decades.” Muslims outside former Mandate Palestine should “assist them … by sending them whatever money and men they are able to, as well as easing the burden upon them and harming their enemy by targeting the Jews and their allies wherever they are found”.
The use of Israel in IS’s propaganda has, therefore, generally not been so much about Israel per se, but has been a mechanism for defining doctrinal boundaries and attacking its rivals for the leadership of the Sunni world, above all Arab governments and other Islamists. IS’s proto-Caliph from 2006 to 2010, Hamid al-Zawi (Abu Umar al-Baghdadi), was consistent in these themes. The first overt “Caliph”, Ibrahim al-Badri (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi), stuck to the same script. And after Al-Badri was killed in 2019, IS largely continued along the these lines.
IS has been contemptuous of populist Arab and Muslim issues surrounding Israel, such as when President Donald Trump moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem in 2017. IS eschewed the easy road of joining in on the anti-Americanism, and went on directing its ire at ‘false’ Islamists, secularists, and democrats among the Sunnis who used the Palestine cause for their own ends. Immediately after the 7 October pogrom, IS held its ground, attacking those who supported an Iranian asset like HAMAS and were concerned about Palestine as an entity. IS contended that the solution to the Jewish Question was to recognise that it was global, that Jews and their allies (i.e., the West) should be attacked globally, and in the meantime the need was to “target the advanced defensive lines and walls of the Jewish petty state, represented by the apostate Arab armies and governments”.
There has been a slight change of emphasis since. The January 2014 statement from IS’s official spokesman, Abu Hudhayfa al-Ansari, calling for a new wave of global terrorism consciously echoed the September 2014 call by Taha Falaha (Abu Muhammad al-Adnani), but with the twist: Falaha directed IS’s loyalists against the West; Abu Hudhayfa directed them against the West and Jews as equivalent priorities, and spoke a lot about this campaign as related to the Gaza war. Abu Hudhayfa’s speech two months later, marking ten years since the caliphate declaration, followed the same framework.
All that said, despite the volume about Israel in these speeches being greater than is usual for IS, the actual substance was not much altered. The iniquities of HAMAS and other rivals for the affections of Sunni extremists were stressed. The major difference was IS highlighting that its own program is to ultimately eradicate of Israel and arguing theirs is the best way to accomplish it, so the violently-inclined should join them. In accepting the Israel-centric framing and trying to divert the post-2023 tide of radicalism into recruits for itself, rather than condemning the excitement in the Muslim world about Palestine as illegitimate and misplaced, IS was somewhat giving in to the temptation of playing the Palestine card, an easy short-cut to popularity as it has often said.2 The reason perhaps relates to IS’s current status at the Centre, with the caliphate swept away, its operatives pushed back into the deserts of Syria, and its insurgency in Iraq seemingly in a downward spiral.
ISLAMIC STATE ATTACKS ON ISRAEL
As for the idea IS never attacks Israel, IS’s attacks on Israel include:
1 January 2016: A mass-shooting by an “inspired” IS operative, an Israeli Arab named Nashat Melhem, in Tel Aviv. Two Israeli civilians were murdered and seven wounded.
8 January 2017: Fadi Al-Qunbar, a Palestinian from the West Bank, murdered four soldiers of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) in a car ramming in Jerusalem. Israel concluded the attack was “inspired” by IS. Al-Qunbar’s family, while proud of his atrocity, denied he had any connection to IS.
16 June 2017: Three Palestinians shot and stabbed IDF Border Patrol soldiers in Jerusalem’s Old City, killing one female and wounding five other soldiers. IS acknowledged that it organised the attack, hence this is often reported as the first claimed IS attack on Israel.3
22 March 2022: Four Israelis were murdered in Be’er Sheva by Mohammed Abu al-Kiyan, who ran over a pedestrian and then went on a stabbing rampage in a shopping mall. IS admitted Al-Kiyan had acted at its behest.
27 March 2022: Ayman Ighbariya and Khaled Ighbariya, who had been arrested in 2016 trying to get to Turkey so they could travel to join the caliphate, shot to death two Israeli border police in Hadera, before being killed in a counter-terrorism raid. IS demonstrated it had fully directed the attack.
In addition to this, IS’s unit in Gaza, the Shaykh Umar Hadid Brigade,4 launched several missile attacks on Israel in 2015, and IS’s branch in southern Syria, Jaysh Khalid bin al-Waleed, clashed with Israeli forces on the northern border in November 2016.
Throughout this period several other IS plots against Israel were disrupted, notably two in Jordan. In November 2019, an IS cell was thwarted as it planned to murder Israeli and American diplomats, and American soldiers, in the Kingdom. And in July 2021, an IS cell plotting to attack into Israel from Jordan was rolled up.
By Aaron Zelin’s count, sixteen IS attacks on Israel, most planned from within the State and some on the West Bank, were foiled in the year after the 7 October pogrom. One of the most serious IS plots was directed against Tel Aviv’s Azrieli Mall. IS’s attempts to attack Israel have continued at pace up to the present.
As can be seen, the capacity of the Israeli security apparatus is a large part of the explanation for the relative dearth of IS attacks on the Jewish State. The other reasons, set out above from IS itself, are the ideological aversion to making a fetish of the “nationalist” cause of Palestine, strategic considerations, and the physical difficulties in getting to Israel, though this “problem” is being somewhat overcome by online communications that allow IS to remote-control loyalists among the Palestinians and Israeli Arabs.
Simply put, while Israel is not a priority target for IS, IS has never been opposed to attacking Israel when possible, and it took such a chance much earlier in its history than is usually recognised.
THE FIRST ATTACK
IS’s founder, Ahmad al-Khalayleh (Abu Musab al-Zarqawi), arrived in Baghdad in May 2002, a year before Saddam Husayn was overthrown, and integrated with the highly developed militant Salafi underground in Iraq and, with help from Bashar al-Asad’s regime, created a cross-border network in Syria that brought in the foreign fighters and suicide bombers. In October 2004, Zarqawi gave a bay’a (pledge of allegiance) to Bin Laden and renamed his forces Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (AQM). One of the first things Bin Laden tried to do after this union was sealed was move a specialised Al-Qaeda cell focused on terrorism against American interests and if possible the American homeland into Iraq. It ended up not working, but Zarqawi had already formulated ideas for regional attacks, and by some accounts had already tried to make a start in his native Jordan. Bin Laden encouraged Zarqawi to move forward with these plans. It was in this context the IS movement launched its first attack against Israel on 27 December 2005.
This attack did not come from nowhere. What is potentially the IS movement’s first ever attempted foreign attack targeted Israel: it was derailed when the Zarqawist agents intending to travel to Israel were arrested in Turkey in February 2002. Two months later, a terrorist cell in direct contact with Zarqawi in Germany was shut down as it plotted to attack Jews. Zarqawi said in one of his speeches, “We fight in Iraq, but our eyes are upon Jerusalem”, a line IS has intermittently drawn attention to.
By late December 2005, the spread of the IS movement beyond Iraq, especially into Jordan, was undisguised, and it was also clear IS was encroaching towards Israel. Indeed, IS had technically already launched an attack into Israel four months earlier. An AQM/IS cell infiltrated Jordan on 7 August 2005, and, after concluding the U.S. Embassy in Amman was too fortified, moved on to Aqaba, the port in southern Jordan that “abuts the Israeli port of Eilat. After noticing two American ships, the U.S.S. Kearsarge and the U.S.S. Ashland, in the Israeli port, the men set their rockets to launch from a rented workshop and fled back to Iraq. On the morning of 19 August 2005, three of the rockets launched toward U.S. ships in Israeli territory, and the rest failed to fire. None hit their intended targets, though an errant explosion killed a Jordanian soldier.”5 AQM issued no official statement about this.6
The 27 December IS attack took place in the evening and consisted of firing three Katyusha rockets from southern Lebanon, aimed at Kiryat Shmona and Shlomi in northern Israel. In the event, the rockets landed in open territory without doing any harm. Far from seeking to downplay a failure, however, the Zarqawists made two separate statements highlighting it. First, AQM’s official spokesman, Abu Maysara al-Iraq, announced on 29 December: “This blessed ghazwa [raid] comes as an affirmation by the mujahideen of their oath to Shaykh Usama bin Laden, the Emir of Al-Qaeda”.7 Next, Zarqawi himself made a speech claiming the attack on 9 January 2006.
What you saw in recent days, the rocket bombardment from southern Lebanon against the descendants of apes and pigs, marks the beginning of a blessed campaign to strike the Zionist enemy at the core of its existence … and all of this was carried out at the direction of the Shaykh of the Mujahideen, Usama bin Laden, may Allah preserve him.
What is perhaps most notable is that most of this speech was devoted to criticising the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP), the manifestation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Iraq, perhaps IS’s most serious political rival in its core areas of operation. The IIP was lambasted for participating in the democratic process—treading a “ruinous path that … has almost destroyed the Sunnis”, when “they should have been calling people to jihad”, as Zarqawi put it. The pattern of using Israel as a wedge against IS’s Sunni rivals was there right from the beginning.
The curious thing about this first Islamic State movement attack on Israel is that it was virtually ignored in the Western press at the time,8 and seems to have been virtually forgotten ever since. Perhaps it just went unnoticed at the tail-end of an IS external attacks wave that only really restarted again in the caliphate era.9 It is also possible Zarqawi was lying. The Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) pointed at the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC),10 a terrorist entity that was an extension of Asad’s secret police, as the perpetrator, and the day after the attack Israel struck at a PFLP-GC base in Syria. But the PFLP-GC never claimed responsibility. More germanely, we have other cases from this period where the IS movement’s claim of responsibility for external terrorism was contemporaneously ignored, yet turned out to be true, like the June 2017 attack on Glasgow Airport. Contrary to the stubborn myth, IS does not just “claim everything”. IS has, and has always had, solid strategic incentives to ensure its messaging is basically trustworthy. IS might exaggerate on the margins—casualty counts, say—but the number of cases where it is plausible IS has fabricated wholesale its involvement is vanishingly small, and even there we still cannot be totally sure.
NOTES
This is frequently done in just-asking-questions manner that is now so common, as in, “Why does IS never attack Israel?”
It might be noted that what IS is doing follows Usama bin Laden. Al-Qaeda, from its formation in the late 1980s, was not much focused on Israel, and Bin Laden’s declaration of war on the West in 1998 made only a passing reference to the “petty state of the Jews”. Al-Qaeda began focusing more on Israel in the mid-2000s, ironically as part of an effort to shore-up Al-Qaeda’s brand after the damage done to it by the conduct of the IS movement, which was at that time an official branch of Al-Qaeda. Once Al-Qaeda and IS formally split in 2014, and the two started competing for the leadership of global jihad, Al-Qaeda found itself on the back foot, eventually settling on a strategy of defining itself against IS. Rather than plunging a relatively small jihadist cadre into an unwinnable war against the whole world to establish a caliphate, Al-Qaeda would present itself as the grown-up jihadi option, determined to work with political realities, pursuing policies that did not trigger a global Coalition to make war against it and meeting Muslim populations where they were, attending to their concerns and socialising them into jihadism to gradually forge a caliphate that has popular buy-in. Al-Qaeda’s propaganda about Israel has increased accordingly in this period.
IS’s statement, interestingly, referring to the location of the June 2017 attack as “Palestine”, instead of “Bayt al-Maqdis”, which is unusual for a jihadist group, and HAMAS claimed that it and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) were actually responsible.
IS’s first governance experiment was in Fallujah in 2004 and it took the U.S. two attempts to dismantle this emirate that year. Umar Hadid led the IS movement as the field commander during those two battles.
Brian Fishman (2016), The Master Plan: ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the Jihadi Strategy for Final Victory, pp. 74-75.
The Zarqawists’ decision not to officially mention the August 2005 incident means we can never be sure about many aspects of their motivation, but it is notable that the day the IS team entered Jordan was the second anniversary of 7 August 2003 IS’s assault on the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad, the moment when it became unarguable that an insurgency was underway in Iraq, and the date the missiles were fired at Eilat (19 August) was the second anniversary of the most “spectacular” early attack, the massive bombing that levelled the Canal Hotel, which was serving as the headquarters of the United Nations.
The Master Plan, pp. 78, 286.
The one exception I can find is an article in The Christian Science Monitor on 13 January 2006.
Jordan’s government is a close ally of the U.S. and Israel, but the population has always been much more hostile. In the early 2000s, the country was dotted with towns where Islamist sentiment prevailed, such as Zarqa (hometown of Zarqawi) and Salt, and more broadly, especially after the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, the monarchy had ceded a lot of the cultural space to radicals, the now-familiar double game of regimes trying to reassure the West and their own anti-Western populations. The result was intimate Jordanian State security cooperation with the U.S. against the Zarqawists, while the Jordanian (State-controlled) media was a megaphone for the “resistance” in Iraq—as it had been for Saddam when he faced down the West for the full length of the Gulf war, from 1990 to 2003.
Against the backdrop, Zarqawi ordered the blowing up of three hotels in Amman frequented by foreign diplomats, including Israelis, on 9 November 2005, slaughtering nearly sixty people and wounding over one-hundred. It turned out to be a disastrous mistake for the IS movement. Zarqawi’s statement hailed the carnage as a strike against the American and Israeli intelligence agencies and their spies, and “dirty Jewish tourists” who come to Jordan “to practice their whoredom and fornications at the expense of the blood and sufferings of Muslims.” But the fact Zarqawi was trying to explain the target selection, rather than triumphantly celebrating, was an indication he knew he was losing. One of the slain was Syrian-American movie producer Moustapha Akkad, best-known for his success with the Halloween horror films, a source of popular pride in the Arab world. More grievously, a Palestinian wedding was taking place at one of the hotels, and the devastation inflicted on the guests was terrible. Societal support for Al-Qaeda in Jordan plummeted from a solid majority before the bombings to a fifth a year or so later, according to a Pew survey.
Al-Qaeda immediately realised Zarqawi’s misstep and Jamal al-Misrati (Atiyya), Bin Laden’s trusted fixer, wrote to Zarqawi in December 2005:
As for external operations—my brother, meaning anything outside the bounds of Iraq—I advise you not to expand without first consulting the brothers [of Al-Qaeda ‘Central’] and taking their counsel. That is the opinion of the brothers here, and they have some thoughts and perspectives they want to convey to you on this matter. … May Allah bless you in avoiding a repetition of the error of poor execution, as happened in Jordan … The most important thing is that you continue your jihad in Iraq.
In the politest way possible, Al-Misrati was telling Zarqawi he had seriously messed up and was to stick to Iraq and cease all external terrorism, unless he first cleared a foreign operation with AQC. Zarqawi did as he was told. The AQM attack on Israel at the end of December 2005 probably took place after Zarqawi received the letter, but it might well have been irreversibly set in train before, and in any case attacking Israel was hardly ideologically-strategically sensitive in the same way as attacks in the Arab States.
See: The Master Plan, pp. 76-77.
The Master Plan, p. 78.