To listen to both Hamas and ISIS, the two Islamist terror groups are enemies. As Foreign Policy noted back in May, Hamas views the Islamic State as a threat to its despotic hold on power in Gaza and destroyed a mosque affiliated with its followers. ISIS returns the sentiment, condemning Hamas for its brutal rule and vowing as recently as this week that it will topple them. What then should we make of the news coming out of Israel this week that Hamas provided vital help to ISIS’s deadly terror attack on Egyptian security forces in the Sinai. No doubt some of Hamas’s apologists will dismiss the claim as an attempt by Israel to discredit an enemy in the eyes of the West. But given the scale of the Sinai attack it is hard to believe that ISIS would have been able to pull it off without serious assistance and the only possible source of that help would have to be Hamas-ruled Gaza. If true, this should not only heighten concerns about the spread of ISIS throughout the Middle East but also call into question some of the assumptions that many in the foreign policy establishment have held about Hamas being a stabilizing rather than a purely destructive force in the region.

As the Times of Israel reports, Israeli military intelligence has made public the fact that Hamas provided both military support to the ISIS operation that killed dozens of Egyptian but has also helped bring wounded ISIS terrorists out of Sinai into Gaza. The Israelis say they have direct proof of involvement in this week’s atrocity and also evidence that leading members of the Hamas’s military wing have been directly involved in assistance to ISIS.

Given the public hostility between the two groups, how is that possible?

The answer to that question comes in two parts. The first relates to the difference between public stances and political reality. The other is a function of the old saying about the enemy of my enemy being my friend.

It would be foolish to think that Hamas and ISIS don’t regard each other with hostility. Hamas rightly fears the growth of any Islamist group that might outflank it by posing as being even more belligerent and bloodthirsty than it may be. Hamas has dealt harshly with any potential rival in Gaza, be it the mainstream Fatah Palestinian party that rules the West Bank or the more radical Islamic Jihad. Hamas regards any rival faction as an enemy by definition and treats them accordingly.

By the same token, ISIS regards all those that won’t recognize the authority of its so-called “caliphate” as foes to be killed without mercy. Its rise throughout the region has been fueled in part by posing as a defender of Islamic values against corrupt elites. Though this is the same game that Hamas played as it gained a foothold in Palestinian politics at the expense of Fatah, they fit nicely into the same role that the corrupt party of Yasir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas played for them. Hamas is every bit as tyrannical as any other Arab or Muslim regime and ISIS clearly thinks it can gain by pretending to be better.

Yet to think of ISIS and Hamas as being in a state of war may be to overestimate their hostility and underrate their grasp of political reality. Hamas doesn’t so much fear ISIS as it does worry about a wild card group making decisions for them about war with Israel at a moment when they might prefer to continue the truce with the Jewish state. Similarly, ISIS has enough on its plate fighting in Syria and Iraq against forces that would like to see it destroyed without opening up a new front in Gaza at a moment when its strength there is minuscule compared to the enormous military that Hamas can deploy against Israel.

But despite animosity and distrust, it is more than obvious that both Hamas and ISIS share a common enemy in Egypt. The Sisi government in Cairo is dedicated to the eradication of the Muslim Brotherhood and regards Hamas, which was founded by Brotherhood supporters and whose help to the group during the unrest in Egypt was included in the charges against former President Mohammed Morsi, as a hostile entity. Egypt is even more determined to isolate Gaza than Israel. In that sense, the Hamas-ISIS connection is a natural alliance.

That’s why Hamas has a vested interest in creating more chaos in Sinai than exists along its border with Israel. No matter what their opinion of each other might be, Hamas understands that the Egyptian government is a far more dangerous threat to its continued survival than is Israel. Under the circumstances it doesn’t take much of a leap of imagination to believe that Israel’s intelligence about Hamas’s involvement in ISIS activities in Sinai has the ring of truth.

This realization ought to do more than cause concern in both Cairo and Jerusalem. The Sinai had already been transformed into something of a Wild West for terror in the years since a bloody Hamas coup allowed the group to seize control of the independent Palestinian state (in all but name) that currently exists in Gaza. But with ISIS moving into the void of security that the Sinai has become, a low level conflict with terrorists may be about to turn into something far more serious.

More to the point, this tacit alliance between otherwise rival Islamist terror groups ought to cause some foreign policy experts who have regarded Western acquiescence toward Hamas’s continued grip on Gaza as a given to rethink that assumption. If Gaza is no longer merely a launching pad for rockets and tunnels aimed at terrorizing Israelis but is also a base for terror aimed at toppling moderate Arab governments, continued tolerance of its sovereignty in Gaza is not only morally wrong; it is a suicidal proposition for the West.

Just as the Israelis have refrained from toppling Hamas in Gaza lest they be stuck governing the dysfunctional strip, so too do Western nations have a distaste for regime change in the strip. But perhaps it is time that those who were so quick to criticize Israel for launching a counter-attack against Gaza-based terrorism last summer realize that the perpetuation of Hamas rule there is a threat to more than the Jewish state. So long as an Islamist terror group has a secure base next to both Egypt and Israel and is getting aid from Iran, it is reasonable to assume that it will be undermining the security of both of those states as well as the rest of the region.

Rather than seeking to loosen up the blockade of Gaza that Israel and Egypt have been enforcing to limit Hamas’s ability to project terror abroad, perhaps the West should understand that pressure on the Islamist state needs to be heightened not diminished.

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