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.

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.