Israel and ISIS, Why the Big Attack Never Came * The Gateway Pundit * by Antonio Graceffo

A common conspiracy theory claims that because ISIS has never attacked Israel, Israel must be behind ISIS. The first problem with this theory is factual: it is untrue that ISIS has never attacked Israel.

The Anti-Defamation League reported that in March 2022, ISIS claimed responsibility for two attacks during a week-long wave of violence that killed 11 people inside Israel. The attacks included a stabbing and vehicle-ramming assault in Be’er Sheva, and two attackers released a video pledging allegiance to the group. According to a CGSRS analysis, ISIS’s Sinai affiliate, Wilayat Sinai, formerly Ansar Bait al-Maqdis, has fired rockets toward the Israeli city of Eilat and, in 2020, sabotaged the Egypt-Israel natural gas pipeline.

A written evidence submission to a UK Parliament committee examining the anti-ISIS coalition further noted that dozens of Israeli Arabs had been arrested for ISIS-linked activity, including a 2015 plot to attack an IDF base. It also quoted Israel’s then-intelligence chief, Ram Ben-Barak, warning about the risk of domestic ISIS cells.

Apart from being untrue, the claim that ISIS would not attack Israel misunderstands the group’s strategy and ideology. ISIS prioritizes the “near enemy” (al-‘adaw al-qarib), meaning Muslim-majority governments it considers apostate, before the “far enemy” (al-‘adaw al-ba‘id), which includes the West, Israel, and the Jews more broadly. This doctrine grew from a strategic split between Osama bin Laden, who prioritized attacking the United States, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose network became the precursor to ISIS and favored first overthrowing Arab governments.

The group’s 2007 manifesto declared that fighting these governments was of “greater necessity than fighting the occupying crusader.” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi followed this sequence when he declared himself caliph in 2014, seeking first to establish an Islamic state and then expand it globally. Baghdadi nevertheless warned Jews in 2015, “We are getting closer to you day by day. Do not think that we have forgotten about you,” and declared that Palestine would be their “graveyard.”

Beyond this hierarchy of strategic priorities, practical constraints further explain why Israel has suffered fewer ISIS attacks than many other nations. ISIS never built a durable organizational presence inside Israel or the Palestinian territories. Israel’s security services limited the group’s ability to establish and operate networks there, while established Palestinian factions already dominated that operational space. Egypt’s military also kept the Sinai affiliate tied down, fighting for its own survival rather than projecting force into Israeli territory, a dynamic described in the CGSRS analysis cited above.

In Europe, ISIS-inspired attacks have repeatedly been linked to asylum seekers, migrants, or their children who became second-generation jihadists. The Heritage Foundation found that asylum seekers or refugees were involved in 16 percent of Islamist plots in Europe between 2014 and 2017. Meanwhile, START InSight found that 89 percent of European terrorist attacks were carried out by first-, second-, or third-generation immigrants, with 26 percent committed specifically by second- or third-generation immigrants.

Israel has a smaller population from which this pattern can emerge. Since 2007, it has legally barred citizens of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon from entering the country under a 2003 “enemy states” law. Its asylum acceptance rate is exceptionally low, with as few as five approvals out of more than 3,500 applications between 2009 and early 2015. The asylum seekers Israel does host come overwhelmingly from Eritrea and Sudan rather than from neighboring Arab states, further narrowing the domestic recruitment base available to ISIS.

Geography also helps explain why ISIS never mounted a sustained campaign against Israel. The group’s headquarters and principal stronghold were in Iraq, which does not border Israel. Its largest territorial expansion was into Syria, bringing ISIS closer to Israel, but the group prioritized defeating the Kurds and other regional rivals.

An ISIS-linked faction did reach the Israeli border, but it lacked the strength to mount an invasion. Jaysh Khalid ibn al-Walid held a strip of territory in the Yarmouk Basin opposite the Golan Heights from 2016 to 2018 and exchanged fire with the IDF in November 2016. However, the group numbered only a few hundred fighters, never advanced beyond sporadic border skirmishes, and was wiped out by the Syrian army and its allies in July 2018.

For ISIS’s main body to reach the Israeli border in force, it would have had to seize and hold a long corridor through hostile territory, defeat other armed groups along the way, maintain extended supply lines, and then confront one of the region’s most heavily defended militaries. Operationally, such an invasion would probably have been suicidal.

The “Israel created ISIS” claim inverts cause and effect. It treats the absence of a full-scale ISIS invasion of Israel as proof of coordination while ignoring both ISIS attacks against Israeli targets and the ideological sequencing that predates ISIS’s founding.

The EU’s disinformation-monitoring project EUvsDisinfo has cataloged this as a recurring disinformation narrative, alongside similar allegations that the United States and Israel created ISIS to justify continued involvement in Syria. The limited scale of ISIS attacks against Israel, compared with its Iraq-Syria campaign, reflects jihadist strategic doctrine and operational constraints, not Israeli sponsorship.