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Israel’s Attack Blew Up Qatar’s Bet on Being Friends With Everyone

The attack on Hamas leaders in the U.S. ally’s capital is pressuring Doha’s strategy of being a back channel to adversaries while showering money on friends.

Qatar's Emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, this week discussed the recent Israeli attack on Doha. Photo: Noushad Thekkayil/EPA/Shutterstock

Qatar's Emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, this week discussed the recent Israeli attack on Doha. Photo: Noushad Thekkayil/EPA/Shutterstock

DOHA—Five days before Israel launched missiles across the Arabian Peninsula at a gathering of Hamas leaders here, some of those same targets were sitting down with Iranian officials in a conference room at the Qatari capital’s Ritz-Carlton hotel.

It was the sort of scene that fairly or unfairly has long inflamed the country’s critics: A U.S.-designated terrorist group meeting openly with a foe of the U.S. and Israel in an opulent setting not far from the most important American air base in the Middle East.

The tiny Persian Gulf state of 350,000 people has long parlayed a willingness to be a back channel for U.S. adversaries in the Middle East—in key instances at America’s behest—into an outsize role in global affairs and protection against getting dragged into the region’s many conflicts.

The country has liberally spread around the largess from its tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue from natural gas, including gifting the U.S. a jumbo jet to be used by President Trump as Air Force One and spending heavily on lobbying, to position itself as an indispensable partner.

None of that helped this summer, as Qatar’s privileged bubble was pierced by missile attacks from Iran and Israel.

Iran’s attack was largely intercepted without incident. But Israel’s surprise attack on Sept. 9 killed several Hamas officials and a member of the Qatari security forces, shattering the calm in Doha and raising alarm across powerful Gulf Arab states that are now wondering whether the billions of dollars they have invested in relationships with the U.S. and Trump have failed to pay off.

“It’s a different country now,” said Rashid Al Mohanadi, a former Qatar defense industry official and director of Doha-based risk advisory Catalyst Consulting. “The minute the bombs fell, people started asking about the relationship with the West.”

The Trump administration has rushed to contain the fallout for the U.S. military relationship and Gaza peace talks. Trump hosted Qatar’s prime minister for dinner last week, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio added a stop in Doha to a previously scheduled trip to Israel. Both praised Qatar’s role in the Gaza talks. 

Qatar has indicated it needs to address its own security concerns first. It also wants to see guarantees that Hamas members can participate in the talks without becoming targets, Arab negotiators said.

 

Marco Rubio and Benjamin Netanyahu at the Western Wall Tunnels.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Netanyahu this past week in Jerusalem. Photo: Nathan Howard/AFP/Getty Images

 

Trump said Monday evening that strikes like Israel’s attack in Doha wouldn’t happen again. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking alongside Rubio at a press conference in Jerusalem, refused to commit to such a pledge, insisting Israel had a right to target terrorists wherever they were.

The talks are stalled anyway at the moment. Israel hasn’t engaged with Hamas’s acceptance of a limited cease-fire, and Hamas hasn’t agreed to the full capitulation sought by Israel. 

Majed al-Ansari, spokesman for Qatar’s Foreign Ministry, said the country is now focused on improving its security even as it continues to believe in its role as a mediator.

Trump acknowledged Qatar’s difficult position after his dinner with the prime minister last week.

“A lot of people don’t understand about Qatar,” he said. “Qatar has been a great ally. They also lead a very difficult life, because they’re right in the middle of everything.”

At an emergency meeting on Monday, the regional Gulf Cooperation Council activated its mutual defense mechanism for the third time ever. It was also activated in 1991 after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait and in 2011 during the Arab Spring. Saudi Arabia on Wednesday said it had signed a mutual defense agreement with Pakistan. The moves were largely symbolic but signaled the level of concern in the Gulf.

Qatar, occupying a small peninsula bordering Saudi Arabia, has grown wealthy thanks to its vast natural gas reserves. Its leaders had a vision to position the country as a diplomatic superpower some three decades ago. The Qatari royal family invested much of the country’s wealth with an eye to building international influence.

In 1996, the country launched Al Jazeera, a now influential news channel that won praise for promoting democratic debate in the region, while also coming under scrutiny for broadcasting the voices of insurgents and Islamist groups. It has become the main window on the civilian toll of the war in Gaza and has been banned by Israel, which accuses it of broadcasting propaganda.

Around the same time, the country started building Al Udeid Air Base, which would become the largest U.S. military installation in the Middle East. Qatar has also bought billions of dollars in U.S.-made weapons in recent years. In 2022, the U.S. designated it as a major non-NATO ally.

In 2013, the U.S. asked Qatar to host leaders of the Taliban with whom it was fighting a war in Afghanistan. Doha brokered peace talks with the Islamist insurgents in 2021 and was the main intermediator facilitating the safe evacuation of Western-aligned Afghans after the Taliban seized control.

 

Qatari and Taliban officials at a press conference in Doha.
Qatari officials spoke at a joint press conference with Taliban representatives in Doha in 2013. Photo: Faisal Al-Tamimi/AFP/Getty Images

 

Qatar has hosted Hamas for more than a decade, an arrangement endorsed by the U.S. to keep channels open with a group that Western officials can’t meet with openly. Doha helped negotiate a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in November 2023 and again in January.

“Hamas is there for a reason, and they’re there because the United States was happy for them to be there and saw that as advantageous,” said Michael Wahid Hanna, director of the U.S. program at International Crisis Group.

Qatar’s strategy has landed it in trouble in the past. In 2017, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain imposed a 3-1/2-year blockade on the country, accusing it of backing Islamist militant groups, a charge the country denies. Among the sore spots was Al Jazeera, which gives Qatar a loud voice in Arab capitals.

This time, it is Israel that is applying the pressure. Government ministers began ramping up criticism of Qatar recently, as frustrations grew about Hamas’s resistance to Israel’s demands in cease-fire talks. They argued Doha should put more pressure on the militant group. Top Israeli security officials recently threatened to attack Hamas leaders living abroad.

 

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WSJ’s Shayndi Raice explains what Israel’s attack on Hamas in Qatar means for the direction of the war and future peace negotiations. Photo: Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters

Israel had previously made use of Qatar’s unique role as a go-between. Half a decade ago, at Washington’s urging and with Israeli support, Qatar sent tens of millions of dollars a month to Gaza to ease economic pressure that could spark an outbreak of violence, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Most went to needy families, but some Qatari funding was siphoned off by Hamas for its military operations, the Journal reported.

Both Netanyahu and Qatar have denied that the money went to Hamas. A Qatari official said its aid to Gaza had take place in coordination with Israel and the U.S. at the request of successive governments, including Netanyahu’s.

For more than a decade, Qatar has had a relationship with the Mossad, Israel’s overseas spy agency, aimed at a reducing tensions with Hamas and more recently to negotiate the release of hostages held by the group. Qatari officials have expressed their sympathy to relatives of the hostages in dozens of meetings with them around the world and in Doha. 

One senior Qatari official has given out his personal number to several families and kept in close touch with the family of American-Israeli hostage Edan Alexander, who was released this year, and kept their photo in his office. Others sent personal notes or gifts such as toys to families when their relatives were released.

Daniel Lifshitz, whose grandparents had been held by Hamas and who still has friends that are captive in Gaza, was meeting with Qatar’s prime minister in downtown Doha the day Israel attacked Hamas with a barrage of ballistic missiles. Lifshitz had sought the meeting to lobby for the release of the remaining hostages. The meeting ended around noon, and he boarded a plane minutes before the missiles landed that afternoon. 

A released hostage walks with her grandson at a rally demanding the release of remaining hostages.
Daniel Lifshitz walked with his grandmother Yocheved Lifshitz last year at a rally after she was released as a hostage from Gaza. Photo: Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

“They talk to all sides,” said Yoel Guzansky, a former Gulf expert for Israel’s National Security Council and now at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies. “This is their DNA. It’s out of the belief that if they mediate between all kinds of different players it’s kind of an insurance policy—the players won’t hurt them.”

Now, the U.S. says it was powerless to stop a missile attack by ally Israel that hit Doha in broad daylight.

The strike has triggered a wider crisis in the Gulf countries, who stake their security on the protection of the U.S. military while investing billions of dollars in the American economy in the form of arms purchases and other economic ties.

“The whole premise of the Gulf was that we have been immune from this whole craziness that we’ve been seeing for years, if not for decades, in failing countries around us,” said Bader Al-Saif, an assistant professor at Kuwait University and analyst on Gulf states’ affairs. “Now we’ve been pulled into it twice in a few months.”

Write to Jared Malsin at jared.malsin@wsj.com, Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com and Anat Peled at anat.peled@wsj.com

Author: Jared Malsin, Benoit Faucon and Anat Peled

Source: WSJ:

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