“We want you to be quiet,” whispered Mohammed Al Emadi, the Qatari envoy in Gaza, into the ear of Hamas’ Khalil al-Hayya. This sentence has been the essence of Qatar’s anesthetizing rhetoric for more than two decades.
Qatar is a wealthy country but faces demographic and geographic challenges and lacks the deep historical, religious and cultural heritage of countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. To position itself as a leading country in the Middle East and worldwide, Qatar’s emirs adopted a strategy of anesthetizing their rivals. They provided financial assistance to Arab regimes while subverting them at the same time.
Qatar has funded extremist Islamic movements, including Hamas, and exploited the feelings of fear, shame and anger among Arab young people, including Palestinians, to incite rebellions benefiting political blocs linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. Key events such as the Arab Spring in 2011, Israel’s May 2021 fighting with Gaza and Arab-Jewish violence, and the October 7 attack on Israel that the Arab world calls Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, demonstrate Qatar’s methods of operation.
The Western world and Israel were anesthetized, making them blind to Qatar. Instead of viewing Qatar as a country that incites terror, they saw it as an ally that restrains terror. They preferred to pursue Iran, which uses tough military power, and to coddle the emir, who used soft power, including financial help.
Qatar aspires to establish an Arab union to release the Arabs from dependence on Saudi financial aid and reliance on Western culture and assistance. It wants to take from Egypt the first rights to the pan-Arab ideology of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who ruled Egypt from 1956 to 1970.
The poem read by Tamim Al-Barghouti at the end of the 2022 World Cup in Doha, the Qatari capital, was a hint of what’s happening in the emir’s court. Barghouti is a social media influencer who operates under the sponsorship of Qatar’s media. He coined the slogans “the liberation of all of Palestine is possible in this generation” and “the liberation of all of Palestine has begun.”
Qatar also operates a network of research institutes and universities, and has links with radical academics like Azmi Bishara, a former Knesset member who fled Israel amid suspicions he spied for Hezbollah. These institutions educate young Arabs, including Palestinians, some of whom later take part in political subversion in their homelands.
As described by the Egyptian activist Abdul Aziz Abdullah, “Dr. Azmi guided us and was our compass in his appearances on Al Jazeera. We considered his opinions sharp, definitive and influential. We thought about escalation all the time, and we were in need of opinions. With great thirst we drank in the words of Azmi Bishara, who became our guide. … Dr. Azmi and his commentaries on the situation greatly influenced the young people. The next encounter will be at the Clock Tower in Jaffa, Bride of the Sea.”
Muna Kurd, an activist who lives in East Jerusalem, took part in an Al Jazeera program in Doha in 2018. The protest she organized in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and the confrontation that erupted at the Al-Aqsa Mosque between young Palestinians and Israeli police officers sparked calls for help from East Jerusalem to Mohammed Deif, Hamas’ military chief. The result was a military escalation against Israel in May 2021.
Birzeit University in the West Bank, where Kurd studied, receives support from Qatar. Its Israel studies program includes criticism such as a view of Israel as a settlement-colonialist and apartheid state while supporting the elimination of the Zionist enterprise. The program is funded by Qatar.
Qatar adopts Muslim and Christian clerics. Among them is Youssef al-Qaradawi, who provided religious legitimization to young Arabs to rebel against their rulers during the Arab Spring. Another is Manuel Musallam of Birzeit, who favors an armed struggle against Israel and was visited by Emadi, the Qatari envoy in charge of transferring Qatari money to Gaza. There is also Ahmed Raissouni, who labeled the Hamas attack on Israel this month “the purest and most honorable jihad.”
The Israeli government made a mistake when it assumed that the Qatari money sent to Gaza would restrain Hamas. This perception pushed Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza, into the arms of Qatar and the radical Hamas leaders who live there.
Sinwar was labeled a collaborator who sold Palestine for money, and someone who, with the other Hamas leaders in Gaza, diverted tax money to military purposes instead of the people’s welfare. Sinwar’s failures to lift the blockade, rebuild Gaza and get Palestinian prisoners released harmed his image and played into the hands of his rival, Qatar-based Khaled Meshal.
Meshal aims to be the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization who leads the struggle for liberation while turning the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas government in Gaza into municipal authorities in charge of everyday life. During Hamas’ attack on October 7, the external Hamas leadership left Qatar for Turkey, maybe to lift suspicions of the emir’s involvement, but Meshal admitted in an interview with Al Jazeera: “The attack was planned, calculated and creative.”
In May, Meshal demanded that Muslim clerics call for a jihad against Israel and declared that the Palestinians and Arabs in general must seek “a new Abdullah Azzam,” a Palestinian scholar and jihadist who was killed in Pakistan in 1989. When Meshal announced this, all the intelligence agencies should have become alarmed and published warnings about Qatar, which sponsors people who dream of a new Osama bin Laden.
Via satellite channels, social media influencers, anti-American and anti-Israeli academics, clerics and the Hamas leadership in Doha, Qatar’s leaders have adopted the cultural norm of honor and disgrace that worked so well during the Arab Spring. They depict themselves as intermediaries while actually they embarrass the Western world, Arab leaders and the PA for collaborating with Israel.
They are also manipulating the Hamas leaders in order to humiliate Israel and portray it as a paper tiger, while also scorning Hezbollah for adopting a strategy of harassing Israel instead of taking on more serious tasks.
The leaders of the free world must demand that Qatar choose. Will it behave like a responsible peace-seeking country or remain a part of the axis of evil, creating chaos and terror?
When it comes to releasing the hostages, it’s wrong to toady to the country that has the blood of murdered people on its hands. Instead, we should ensure that the United States, which maintains the largest military base in the Middle East in Qatar, makes clear to the Qataris what they’re about to lose.
First published in Haaretz, 30.10.2023
