It wouldn’t be surprising if, when you saw that this column is about Qatar, you thought, “Why???”
I mean, be honest. Could you even find Qatar on a map?
Let me help. It’s that little (orange) thumb in the Persian Gulf, sticking up from the eastern shore of the vast Saudi peninsula.
Many of us might never have thought much about Qatar until it popped up as a key middleman, a key negotiator in the war between Israel and Hamas. From efforts to get aid into Gaza, to getting hostages out, to securing a humanitarian pause in the fighting, Qatar has been right in the middle of things. A small rich nation in the Gulf— rich with natural gas rather than oil— has woven its way through the spider webs of rivalries and alliances in the Middle East to become central to all sides in this war.
It isn't Qatar's first time playing a role like this. As you might remember, Qatar was the intermediary in talks between the U.S. and the Taliban preceding our withdrawal from Afghanistan. Even more recently, just last September, it was the middleman winning the release of some Americans who'd been imprisoned in Iran.
(You also might remember that in 2022 Qatar hosted soccer’s men’s World Cup, for which it spent more than $200 billion and from which it earned plaudits worldwide, and that almost 30 years ago Qatar founded Al Jazeera television which, despite its own biases, has become a major global source of news.)
The thing about Qatar, the quality that makes it unique, is this: it has effective if not always fond relationships with adversaries in conflicts who won’t sit together in the same room. It can talk, and does, with both Israel and Hamas, with both Iran and the United States. Here’s a scenario that tells the story: Qatar hosts the exiled leadership of Hamas, but at the same time, it hosts the Al Udeid Air Base, the biggest American air base in the Middle East.
If there were to be a middleman in the Middle East, we might more readily expect someone like Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, both of which pack a powerful punch in the region. Or a traditional power like Egypt, which also is involved as a negotiator in the war but is second fiddle to Qatar. It’s Qatar that everyone talks to. More important, it’s Qatar that everyone trusts.
The Emir of Qatar has been an honest broker. Since the war started, President Biden periodically has spoken with him to send messages to, and get information about, Hamas. Everyone from the U.S. Secretary of State to the Secretary of Defense to the head of the CIA has made stops in Qatar since the war started almost three months ago.
Yet all the while, from its almost half-trillion dollars in assets, Qatar is one of the principal funders of Hamas. That has drawn denunciations in the Arab world where, for a half-dozen years, Saudi Arabia and the UAE and others cut their ties with Qatar, accusing it of backing Islamic terrorists. And it has drawn denunciations in the Western world. There are stories about Qatari diplomats taking tens of millions of dollars into Gaza every month in cash-filled suitcases, which also led to the charge that Qatar has been supporting terrorists. Its explanation is that it gave cash because the Gaza Strip has always been a cash economy, and that the money was used to house people, and feed people, and provide medical care, and that the money is dispersed through the United Nations and its distribution always has been very carefully monitored.
In a chaotic society like that where dollars can disappear like grains of sand, color me skeptical, but since major donor money from the U.S. and the European Union and the wealthy Gulf states was pilfered by corrupt functionaries with the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, the money had to come from somewhere. It helps Qatar’s case that it was long done with the covert approval of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, ostensibly to keep the peace.
There are other things about Qatar that fail some people’s smell tests.
As The Hill reported in November, “Immediately following the September 11 terror attacks, Qatar began pumping money into American universities, delivering $4.7 billion over two decades. At the same time, six major American universities established ‘foreign campuses’ within Qatar.” You can get an engineering degree at Texas A&M University at Qatar, a degree in business, information systems, or computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, a medical degree from the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, or a degree from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar. The question critics ask though is, how if at all is Qatar influencing education on these schools’ American campuses?
Then just the day before yesterday, the federal corruption indictments against New Jersey Democratic senator Bob Menendez were expanded to include allegations that he took bribes from a real estate developer in exchange for helping connect the developer with a Qatari investment fund. Critics ask, does this make Qatar as corrupt as Menendez?
The fact is, we might not pay nearly as much attention to any of this if Qatar hadn’t landed in such a pivotal and influential role in the Middle East war. Last month I moderated a program about that for the Vail Symposium in Vail, Colorado. Its purpose was to answer the question, why Qatar?
According to the panelists on stage— Simon Henderson from The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and Douglas A. Smith, the former Assistant Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, who spent years working on security issues in the Middle East— the answer is in the world view of the people who run Qatar.
As Smith put it, they get along with everybody. They want to get along with everybody. Surrounded as they are by more powerful Gulf neighbors, they have to get along with everybody. Not just to play the periodic role as middleman, but in a part of the world where nations live by the slogan, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” to avoid alliances that would enhance some friendships at the cost of others.
Henderson tells surprising stories about Qatar’s history with Israel. Until three years ago, only Egypt and Jordan had formal ties with the Jewish state. Other Arab nations, if they weren’t in a state of war with Israel, were in a state of rancor. Except Qatar.
Henderson has written that “the Qatari-Israel relationship dates to the 1990s.” He tells a story about a Qatari diplomat named Al Emadi.
“Every two or three months,” Henderson says, “he has flown to the Jordanian capital, Amman, and then driven into Israel.” He openly stayed in high-end hotels, declaring that “The Waldorf Astoria in Jerusalem is ‘the best’.” An old friend is General Yoav Mordechai, Israel’s former “coordinator of government activity in the (Palestinian) territories.” Al Emadi “speaks of the trust he has built with Israeli officials,” Henderson writes, "but he also is trusted by the Palestinians, who are open with him.”
That’s the place the Qataris occupy today: despite shady inferences from their dealings, they’re doing something right, because they are everyone’s friend, or at least everyone’s trusted contact. Qatar can’t force Israel or Hamas to do what they don’t want to do. But it tries. And sometimes it succeeds, or at the very least, gets closer than anyone else can.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Thanks for refreshing peoples’ insight into Qatar Greg.
And just how is Qatar enunciated? Ketter I think but not sure. Side note: money is “disbursed”