Israel has a score to settle with Qatar

Even if Hamas ever sought to establish a ministry of information outside Gaza, it could not, no matter how hard it tried, set up a better outfit than Al Jazeera.

The Qatari media noise, which suggests that Doha and its TV channel are standing with the Palestinians, Hezbollah and the Iranians, does not impress Tehran.

With the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, talk has resumed about a truce in Gaza and about Qatar’s role in the process as a mediator. The US administration has renewed its contacts with Doha to urge it to activate its mediation efforts. Of course, no one in the current US administration expects any real progress. We are days away from the US elections, and the current Biden administration is in its final months in office, a time when outgoing presidents are described as “lame ducks”.

The Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration is caught in limbo. This is so not only because a new president will be taking over after November 5, but also because Kamala Harris has no convincing presence on the scene.

In the meanwhile, Republican candidate Donald Trump, the likely newcomer to the White House, is acting as if he had just taken a few years off from the presidency and is now getting ready to return.

Any Biden administration official, including the national security team in charge of the Middle East issues, including the secretaries of state and defence, the national security advisor and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, knows that matters are too intertwined to allow for any diplomatic mediation initiative, even if it is simply to avoid being later blamed for inaction.

There is reason to believe that any election result that does not come with a large and decisive margin of victory for Harris will spark a new crisis in Washington, with Trump setting it in motion as he did four years ago.

Washington has now its mind elsewhere, until further notice. The currently muddled landscape does not serve Qatar’s interests. It leaves Israel with a time margin of a few weeks during which it can seize the initiative and escalate the conflict to a level beyond the current dangerous threshold.

Doha may find itself treading on thin ice, whatever the position it takes. Israel has an open score to settle with Qatar, while Iran has enough regional experience to figure out it cannot trust the Qataris nor take what they say as authoritative nor carved in stone.

The Israelis’ score to settle with Qatar is driven by many considerations. Doha is still the official headquarters of Hamas and is the home base of the remainder of the militant Palestinian group’s leadership. Qatar was responsible for funding Hamas over the years, transferring hundreds of millions of dollars which the militant group used to pay fighters’ salaries, build tunnels under Gaza and possibly also purchase weapons.

Even if Hamas ever sought to establish a ministry of information outside Gaza, it could not, no matter how hard it tried, set up a better outfit than Al Jazeera.

The TV channel, whose coverage of Palestinian-related events is non-stop, has devised a new formula where it divides its screen into six windows, each one dedicated to covering one side of the war or showing interviews and comments.

Furthermore, it has expanded the scope of its coverage to add the Lebanon war. No one knows exactly how much Doha spends on Al Jazeera’s every month, but the outlay is unlikely to be less than the monthly payments Qatar used to allocate to Hamas before the war broke out.  Al Jazeera’s live coverage of the war costs more than the monthly salaries of the Hamas fighters.

Israel also has another axe to grind with Qatar. It has to do with Doha’s political positions as expressed by its emir and prime minister, or at least what they declare in public as opposed to what they say in closed meetings with Israeli, Egyptian and American intelligence officials.

The Israelis will not underestimate Al Jazeera’s policy of support for Hezbollah either. They will assume that Arab viewers have a short memory and have already forgotten what the channel used to say about Hezbollah and Hassan Nasrallah during the years of hostility between Qatar and the Lebanese militant party due to the Syrian civil war.

Al Jazeera is now showcasing Hezbollah’s heroism in the face of Israeli aggression in Lebanon, not the party’s past crimes in Syria. Al Jazeera has paid tribute to Hassan Nasrallah with much more fervour than in its eulogy for Ismail Haniyeh when he was assassinated by Israel in Tehran.

Al Jazeera analysts have now moved on to talk about Hezbollah’s tactics and victories in southern Lebanon as it faces off with Israel’s army.  Its portrayal of the confrontation includes the same denial of the destruction on the ground which its experts had maintained when talking about the Gaza war. It is true that the Qatari leadership kept its statements about the deterrence of Israeli aggression in Lebanon quite vague in order not to appear to be supporting Hezbollah. But that does not much change Israel’s perspective on Doha since the news channel and the Qatari state have been engaged in systematic mass mobilisation on two levels. On one level, they tried to convince the Palestinians and the Lebanese that the destruction wrought on them by Israel is only a stage of the war and that the successive assassinations of their leaders will not affect the course of the conflict. The second level is the mobilisation of public opinion in the region against Israel and attempts to maintain the momentum of political tension among peoples and regimes alike.

The Qatari media noise, which suggests that Doha and its TV channel are standing with the Palestinians, Hezbollah and the Iranians, does not impress Tehran.

The Iranians do not trust the Qataris nor what their media outlets say. They have tested them in Lebanon and Syria and saw how they can turn against their allies, not only through media campaigns and political boycotts, but also in their funding of Assad’s opponents with billions of dollars and supplying them with weapons that end up harming not only Assad’s forces, but also Hezbollah fighters, the Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Forces and Iranian advisors.

The Iranians remember the days of Syria and Lebanon, and recall the more distant episodes of Al Jazeera standing with Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s regime, the way it stood more recently with Hezbollah and Hassan Nasrallah. The war of attrition in the late nineties and early 21st century was waged against Iraq from the Al Udeid and Al Sailiya military bases in Qatar. Then the war to topple the Iraqi regime, which later erupted in 2003, was directed from those two bases, with Al Jazeera covering American strikes on Baghdad after US fighter jets took off from the airfields a few kilometres away from the channel’s headquarters. These memories were certainly on Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s mind when visiting Doha, during the first stop on his recent Gulf tour.

The Iranian minister’s words provoked the Qataris to the extent that Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani had to personally pledge that Al Udeid Air Base would not be used to carry out strikes against any country in the region. There is no doubt that the Iranians imagine very well that US forces will not hesitate to use any available weapons, monitoring systems and operational command centres at the bases, if they had to back up the Israelis during a potential attack on Iran in retaliation for the October 1 Iranian missile strikes. Even a “lame duck” president in Washington would stand up to an Iranian retaliation against Israel and other countries of the region, especially if it comes to oil installations, power generation sites or military bases.

The United States, which has stationed thousands of soldiers and hundreds of aircraft and missiles at Al Udeid base for a quarter of a century, will not hesitate to use them if needed. Washington knows very well that the Iranians are ready to carry out their threats, even if their missiles are unlikely to deliver harmful strikes against Israel.

If the Jewish state attacks Iran, the geographical routes used in the attacks, especially if the targets are to include southern Iranian oil loading facilities, will be close or through Gulf airspace.

The Iranians have taken the precaution of making sure all Gulf Cooperation Council countries, as a single bloc, are included in their threats, hence anticipating the possibility that GCC members would activate the provisions of their joint defence agreement if necessary.

In Israeli strategic planning, targeting Iran seems to be a priority. In the past few weeks, Israel has exhausted its bank of Palestinian and Lebanese targets of value and of available Iranian targets in Lebanon and Syria.

By killing Yahya Sinwar, it has appeased the advocates of revenge in Israel, but is hardly in the mood to slow down the pace of the war, paving the way for a future phase of dangerous escalation that could affect all countries in the region.

This prospect seems particularly worrisome for Qatar, which could find itself dragged into a war whose repercussions it failed to anticipate early on.

For the Israelis, it seems that the retaliation process has unfolded with Hamas being the first target, and then it moved on to attack Hezbollah. It makes no difference to Israel whether the third target is Iran or, ultimately, Qatar, even if that could be a result for which it had not originally planned.

Israel’s is setting its eyes on a bank of valuable and ever-changing new targets. 

Haitham El Zobaidi is the Executive Editor of Al Arab Publishing House.