Last Friday, a Syrian man, apparently acting on instructions from Islamic State (IS) went on a stabbing spree at a festival in the German town of Solingen, killing three and wounding eight others. The attack came amid a spate of terrorism in Europe, which included the car bombing of a French synagogue on Saturday. Kyle Orton observes that there have been many foiled IS attacks in Germany in the past months, and explains the country’s significance to the terrorist group:

Germany was the first state targeted by Islamic State terrorism in April 2002. The “Tawhid cell,” mostly comprising Palestinians with various forms of legal residency, plotted to blow up the Jewish Museum in Berlin and a Jewish-owned bar in Dusseldorf. The cell leader, Mohamed Abu Dhess (Abu Ali), was in regular contact with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, IS’s founder. Zarqawi was based in Iran at the time, where Dhess met him to finalize the plan, and Zarqawi then remotely walked Dhess through every stage of the conspiracy.

Two things are notable about the Tawhid cell plot. First, the main features—carried out mostly by foreigners, directed by IS “Center,” and an emphasis on Jews—have remained constant in IS’s activities in Germany down to the present day. Second, this was a year before the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.

Islamic State, Orton explains, has been slowly rebuilding its capacity to carry out attacks in Europe, and the conditions have again become ripe thanks to

the increasing public displays and social acceptability of anti-Semitism in Europe in the wake of the October 7 pogrom. The rape and slaughter of Jews on a scale unknown since the Holocaust electrified and emboldened anti-Semites in Europe, who initially turned out to support Hamas overtly and celebrate the pogrom and have since transitioned to protests accusing Israel of “genocide” and demanding a ceasefire that preserves Hamas in power. IS detected an opportunity.

IS’s current spokesman, Abu Hudhayfa al-Ansari, made IS’s return to foreign attacks official on January 4, the day after the suicide attacks in Iran though recorded before. IS must have considered its international network to be robust enough by then to withstand the additional scrutiny such an announcement would bring.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].