Episode 61: How Tiny Qatar Became a Global Player
These days when a thorny international conflict is resolved, more and more often a major player in the negotiation has been the small Persian Gulf state of Qatar. The country has made itself uniquely indispensable on the global stage by trying to play nice with pretty much everyone, including Hamas and Iran. And also by keeping on very good terms with the United States. Peter visits Qatar to see this high-wire act of diplomacy up close.
Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.
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Recently, I was sitting in the audience at a conference on Global Security, listening to a woman recount her experience on October 7th, when her great-niece was kidnapped by Hamas.
ARCHIVAL Liz Hirsh Naftali: … and did everything I could to get Abigail and 240 hostages free. After Abigail was kidnapped, she was released.
When her story was finished, she had someone to thank for Abigail’s release.
ARCHIVAL Liz Hirsh Naftali: I am in great appreciation for the United States President Joe Biden.
And someone else…
ARCHIVAL Liz Hirsh Naftali: To the Qatari leadership, to his Excellency, the prime minister, Al Thani, for the mediation and the work that they did.
She thanked the ruler of Qatar, a small country in the Persian Gulf, about the size of Connecticut. In recent years little Qatar has taken an outsized role in global affairs. Two years ago, President Joe Biden named Qatar a “major non-NATO ally” to the U.S. And today it’s at the center of ending the world’s most controversial war, by serving as a mediator between Israel and Hamas.
Actually this conference I was attending? It took place in Qatar. World leaders, top journalists and national security experts converge there every year.
ARCHIVAL Steve Clemons: I'm a reporter for the New York Times.
ARCHIVAL John Miller: …leads the NCTC, or the National Counterterrorism Center.
ARCHIVAL Steve Clemons: You're the lead negotiator right now between Hamas and the Israelis…
Just a few decades ago, Qatar was a desert wilderness with not much in the way of business, other than some limited oil fields and diving for pearls.
ARCHIVAL Documentary Voice Over 1: No one forgets that it all started with the pearls that were fished from the water's depths at the price of considerable effort.
That all changed after massive natural gas reserves were discovered, which fueled a sovereign wealth fund that now has some half a trillion dollars. That’s allowed Qatar to make some major purchases…
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Qatar's royal family has bought the iconic Italian fashion house Valentino.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Qatar buying the Plaza Hotel, $600 million.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: Landmark in New York City.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: It sure is.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 4: They bought up the tallest building in the country: the Shard.
ARCHIVAL Documentary Voice Over 2: This is all in addition to a diversified real estate portfolio that makes the state of Qatar the largest single property owner in London.
And in a stunning victory for the tiny desert nation, it won the biggest bid in global sports in 2010.
ARCHIVAL FIFA Official: The winner to organize the 2022 FIFA World Cup is….Qatar!
Qatar is also home to one of the most successful — and controversial — media outlets in the world.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster: …This is Al Jazeera, live from Doha, also coming up: thousands of refugees on…
Buying a fashion brand, hosting a major sporting event, snapping up some posh real estate. Well, that’s one thing. But why didn't Qatar just stop there? Why launch a controversial global news organization? Why choose to put itself at the center of conflict resolution in one of the most conflict-dense regions of the world? And what kind of a risk is Qatar taking by insisting that it be at the center of the action — and on the flip side, would it be riskier for this small country in a dangerous neighborhood just to do nothing at all?
I'm Peter Bergen. This is In the Room.
[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]
Peter Bergen: Can you just describe what we're looking at here?
[SOUNDS OF DOWNTOWN QATAR]
Rami Khouri: What we're looking at here is part of the, the downtown area. So this is the Corniche, the main road along the water.
This is Rami Khouri, a journalist who has reported in the Middle East for five decades. Khouri was among the speakers at that global security conference. During a break we chatted on my hotel balcony, overlooking downtown Doha.
Rami Khouri: You see a lot of Qataris walking along the Corniche, in the evenings, on the weekends. They've got a lot of marinas for rich people and boats and stuff like that, and, and then the next step is average Qataris — because not all Qataris are wealthy — to have average middle-class families be able to enjoy access to the water, uh, to the beach.
Peter Bergen: You know, in Europe there were so-called enlightened despots. It was still an absolute monarchy, but they were trying to do things for their people.
Rami Khouri: I think most monarchs probably feel that they have to be aware of their people's needs and sentiments because if they totally ignore them, it might come back and kick you in the ass.
Peter: Right.
Rami Khouri: So If you're in a wealthy country and people's fundamental needs are met, they have water, they have electricity, their kids go to school, uh, that makes a big difference in calming people down. But when you do that, you've satisfied people's material needs, they then have other needs. They want to be involved in sharing in decision making.. but I think the Qataris have done a pretty good job of finding the balance between allowing people to develop their talents, if they want but then if they want to create a political party and install a socialist system, they probably would get some pushback. [PETER LAUGHS]
One of the things that makes Qatar a little unusual among its neighbors in the Persian Gulf, is its embrace of intellectual inquiry. I had the chance to visit Education City which includes the campuses of six prestigious American universities including Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Northwestern, and Georgetown, where young men and women were studying together, not unlike what they would be doing at the Georgetown main campus in Washington, D.C.
[SOUNDS OF THE CAMPUSES, PETER WALKING]
Peter Bergen: I’m following you…
Moamer Qazafi: Ok, ok.
My tour guide told me why Qatar had sought out Georgetown in the first place.
Moamer Qazafi: You see, what's unique about here in Education City is they only have universities that are among the best in the disciplines they teach anywhere else in the world.
Peter Bergen: And of course, Georgetown School of Foreign Service is, you know, the best in the United States.
[SOUNDS OF THE CAMPUSES FADE]
Peter Bergen: For a lot of people who are listening to this who may not have had as much time in the Gulf as you, how surprising is it that you have universities like Georgetown, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon, you know, operating as normal universities in a Gulf kingdom?
Rami Khouri: It is unusual for the Gulf and for the whole Arab region. Doha is the most impressive because it is spending a couple of billion dollars a year on institutions that train and allow people to use their minds. Universities, libraries, cultural centers, museums, institutions that, uh, really can do serious research, hold meetings, public meetings, where people are invited to discuss political issues. The Qataris have, have persisted on this path. And they, they allow what I call serious scholarships at the universities and research centers, which is not, you know, provocatively threatening to the system.
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
Mehran Kamrava: I always have a hard time describing Qatar to people who haven't been here.
Mehran Kamrava is a political scientist and the author of Qatar: Small State, Big Politics. He’s been teaching at Georgetown’s Doha campus for 17 years.
Mehran Kamrava: One of the ways that I've kind of tried to describe it is that it's some sort of a hybrid between Tucson, Arizona, and Hong Kong in terms of, it's very densely populated areas and also its desert landscape.
He described the frenetic pace at which the city is reshaping itself.
Mehran Kamrava: There's constant construction going on. This kind of preoccupation with remaking the city. As soon as a road is built, it's dug up, it's torn up. The city, you know, it's expanding into the desert, it's expanding into the sea, and it's expanding into the sky in ways that would have been difficult to imagine, 20, 30, and of course 40 years ago.
The extent of Qatar’s fossil fuel riches was discovered late compared to its neighbors. It wasn’t until 1972 that the world's largest natural gas reserves were discovered in an area that spans Qatar and Iran. Those gas reserves are nearly as large as Qatar itself. It took more than two decades to bring that gas to market, and that’s when Qatar’s economy began to take flight, and with it, its role on the global stage.
Mehran Kamrava: Up until 1995, Qatar really didn't play an active role regionally, globally, or internationally. And we had a leadership transition in 1995 when former ruler, former emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa, overthrew his father and started a series of major reforms, steadily started playing to a global audience.
That included founding Al Jazeera, the Arabic and English language news organization, an organization the George W. Bush administration hated.
ARCHIVAL Donald Rumsfeld: What Al Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate, and inexcusable.
In fact, at one point, President Bush even mused — maybe as a joke, maybe not — about bombing Al Jazeera’s offices in Doha.And during the Bush administration the U.S. was so angry over Al Jazeera’s coverage of al-Qaeda, that it considered pulling all its troops out of Qatar unless the country reined in the network.
That would’ve been a huge undertaking: the U.S. military base in Qatar is the biggest U.S. military installation in the Middle East, with over 8,000 U.S. service members stationed there today. The U.S. started using that base heavily after the 9/11 attacks and that marked an important turning point for Qatar, Mehran Kamrava, the political scientist says, because, for a small country with a tiny military, its protection by the U.S. was now assured.
Mehran Kamrava: That's when Qatar really has its moment in history. It begins to project influence, power, try and shape the destinies of a number of countries in the region.
Despite the fact that Qatar has this large U.S. military base, it also has close ties with its neighbor Iran. Kamrava says this all makes sense if you put yourself in Qatar’s shoes for a minute: you’re this little country with scant military power, and you find yourself sitting on the world’s biggest gusher of natural gas. What’s to stop your more powerful neighbors from swallowing you up?
Mehran Kamrava: For a small country, there aren't too many options in terms of what foreign policy line to adopt. What Qatar does, is to kind of place your bet in multiple different directions. You kind of place your security bet one way, and then you place a bunch of smaller bets another way. In other words, what you try and do is to have as many friends as possible and as few adversaries as possible. You maintain open lines of communication with everybody. You are more friendly with some than with others, but you talk to the Americans, you talk to the European Union, but you also don't alienate the Iranians and you maintain open lines of communication with the Iranians. And that's what Qatar has done. It has tried to hedge its bet.
But Qatar’s attempts to gain allies, as well as global clout through fashion brands and real estate, hasn’t always been well regarded. During the lead-up to the World Cup, it was accused of “sportswashing:” the attempt to use the pomp and circumstances of the global soccer event to distract from Qatar’s less savory qualities. The country, for example, has been funding Hamas for years, and conditions for migrant workers, who perform the jobs that wealthy Qataris won’t do, are often exploitative.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Qatar's treatment of migrant workers has been one of the main controversies of this World Cup.
So, if Qatar was trying to sportswash its reputation, it may have put its cleat in its mouth. The event drew massive news coverage, including of the dangerous, even lethal conditions for the migrant workers who flocked there from countries like India, Kenya and Nepal to build the enormous infrastructure.
ARCHIVAL Migrant Workers Speaking with English Voiceover: We have not received any salary for months and cannot send money home. Neither the labor court nor the embassy helps us.
And there was plenty of evidence that bribery helped steer the selection process that brought the World Cup to Qatar in the first place. Qatari organizers denied involvement.
But Qatar has been more successful in its bid to showcase its prowess as a mediator — sometimes helping to rescue hostages, or even trying to stop wars. One of their first efforts as a mediator was in 2004, when they helped negotiate the release of two French journalists who were held in Iraq by a terrorist group.
Rami Khouri: My impression is that the Qataris decided some years ago they didn't have the money — they have a lot of money, but they didn't have enough money — to buy everybody off, they didn't have the military power, They don't have the great cultural or other influences. So they needed to find ways in which they became not just useful but indispensable to other people. The negotiation stuff that they do, which they've done, they have done it in many places. They've done it in Lebanon. They've tried it in Sudan. They're trying to really develop an expertise and a credibility in that respect. And that requires that they have good relations with everybody. You, you can't be a mediator if you can't talk to everybody, because you never know who you're going to mediate between.
Qatar’s allies also include the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, which Qatar supported in Egypt during the “Arab Spring.” Political scientist Kamrava says that in Egypt, that turned out to be a bad bet, because the Muslim Brotherhood proved to be incompetent at governing the country, but the Qataris continue to have their reasons for retaining good relations with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Mehran Kamrava: There's this assumption by Qatari leaders that, in so far as the future of the Middle East is concerned, political Islam has a role to play, much the same way that Christianity has played a historical role in the political life of Europe. And so one way to moderate political Islam is to enable it to take part in the political process. Qatar is the only state that I know of in the greater Middle East that does not have an Islamist opposition. And you got to ask yourself, “Why is that the case?” And the reason that's the case is because the state has pursued such carefully calibrated policy towards political Islam in a way that the population looks at the state and says, you know what? Unlike the Egyptian state, unlike the Emirati state, unlike the Bahraini or the Saudi or any of the other states, this is not a state that is innately opposed to political Islam. And in that sense, it's a tremendous source of political capital for the Qatari state, not to have a religious opposition domestically.
In 2017, Qatar reached another turning point. After Donald Trump was elected U.S. president, he made his first international trip as president not to a close democratic ally like Mexico or Canada — as is traditional — but to Saudi Arabia, Qatar’s much bigger neighbor. Trump shared the Saudis’ view that Qatar should break its ties with Iran, and he seemed to give several Arab countries the green light to put the squeeze on Qatar.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Several countries have cut ties with Qatar, accusing it of fostering terrorism, allegations Qatar vehemently denies.
Mehran Kamrava: The 2017 rift, really, was an effort to bring the young Qatari leadership in line with Saudi priorities At that time there was a huge rift between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
The bloc led by Saudi Arabia issued Qatar a list of 13 demands.
Mehran Kamrava: One of the main objectives was for Qatar to break its relations with Iran. Another was to… get rid of Al Jazeera. Those 13 demands that were presented to Qatar in 2017 were meant to be rejected. They were unimplementable.
And so, Qatar's neighbors blockaded the country, cutting it off from key supply chains overnight. Here’s Saudi Minister Adel al-Jubeir in 2018 defending the blockade:
ARCHIVAL Adel al-Jubeir: It’s just, we don’t want to have anything to do with them. [AUDIENCE LAUGHS] The Qataris, since the mid-90s, have been sponsoring radicals. The Qataris harbor and shelter terrorists, that’s not acceptable.
The blockade seemed like a serious threat to everyday life: After all at the time, Qatar imported 90 percent of its food.
Mehran Kamrava: Qatar turned out to be more resilient. And so they had made other arrangements already with the Turks, with the Iranians, in terms of, uh, flyover rights over Iranian airspace.
That included some… flying cows?
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: What to do when Saudi Arabia cuts your yogurt, milk, and cheese supply? If you're an enterprising Qatari business, you buy dairy cows, 4,000 of them, from the United States and Australia. They're going to be loaded en masse into multiple 747s…
Incredibly, in the middle of the desert, with virtually no naturally occurring freshwater, Qatar was able to get a dairy industry successfully up and running.
ARCHIVAL Interviewee: We are already self-sufficient one year after.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: And I'm told this factory will soon be run by robots.
[SOUND EFFECTS OF ROBOT COWS]
The blockade of Qatar by several Arab states lasted for more than three years, but in the end, Qatar didn’t budge on its relations with Iran or its funding of Al Jazeera. And despite its seeming bad blood with the Trump administration, Qatar continued to act in a mediator role, serving as the venue for talks between the United States and the Taliban in 2019, even as the blockade dragged on. Finally, in 2021, the blockade on Qatar was lifted.
Mehran Kamrava: The Trump administration was leaving office. And so, that unconditional support from the United States that had been so instrumental in driving the blockade was no longer there. And then in some ways, the Qataris turned out to be much more resilient and resourceful than really anybody anticipated. Life went on as usual, and it turned out that the blockade didn't necessarily work in the same way that Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the UAE anticipated.
Since then, Qatar has continued to carve out a role as a mediator on the global stage. In May, at the Global Security Forum, Qatar was quite literally center stage, as its lead negotiator in the Gaza War, Minister Mohammed Bin Abdulaziz Al-Khulaifi, spoke with the American journalist Steve Clemons in front of a packed audience.
Steve Clemons: How complex is that for you serving as a mediator to the different sides? Are you not perceived by Israel to be a host of Hamas, a friend of Hamas? How do you convince both parties to trust you?
Mohammed Bin Abdulaziz Al-Khulaifi: What makes Qatar as a unique mediator are several important factors. One of which Qatar’s at start doesn't believe in the impossible mission for mediation. As you know, historically, we have dealt with extremely difficult and complex mediation cases. Taliban and the U.S. as an example of those very difficult scenarios. Another important factor that we're dealing with is that crises today, Steven, are extremely complicated. It's way different than 10 years or even 20 years before. So which requires Qatar to equip its team with the right amount of expertise…
Admittedly that all sounds kinda vague. But we’re talking about the delicate negotiations for a ceasefire in Gaza and releasing hostages held by Hamas, the exact details of which are all very closely held; in fact it was remarkable that Qatar put its chief negotiator on a stage at all. Kamrava, the Georgetown political scientist, filled in a few more details about what sets Qatar apart in its approach:
Mehran Kamrava: There's a very small inner circle of people in Qatar that make foreign policy and that gives them tremendous agility and that small inner circle, which can respond to crises quickly, tends to also be extremely wealthy. And so they have tremendous resources at their disposal. And quite frankly, a lot of persuasion power with their wealth to, um, kind of persuade others to see the world, the way they want them to see. Qataris do it in a distinctively Qatari way, making sure everyone knows Qatar is involved, making sure everybody knows Qatar was the party that effected, uh, release of hostages, or prisoner swap, or was the one that resulted in success of the mediation efforts. And sometimes that has succeeded and sometimes it hasn't because certain cases require discretion and the parties that are involved don't necessarily want the outside world to know that they're negotiating together. So I think in this sense Qatar's track record has been mixed, quite frankly.
Qatar’s attempts to serve as a mediator for conflicts going on in Lebanon, Sudan and Yemen have been something of a mixed bag. And some see the country as playing a dangerous double-game of supporting forces that are in opposition to each other. No case illustrates this more starkly than their role in negotiating between Israel and Hamas.
The headquarters of Hamas’s political arm is located in Qatar, a location that was encouraged by the United States. And in 2018 Qatar also started sending Hamas millions of dollars for humanitarian purposes. By some estimates, Qatar has sent Hamas more than a billion dollars. Common sense would tell you that some of that funding inevitably gets spent on Hamas’s military operation. And in a bizarre twist it turns out that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was on board for this funding...
ARCHIVAL Newscaster: … reporting that the Netanyahu government was aware of and approved of millions of dollars in aid to Hamas from the government of Qatar in the mistaken belief it would buy them off and prevent a terror attack.
Mehran Kamrava: The fact that Qatar houses Hamas political leadership here in Doha, has been extremely costly in terms of Qatar's reputation, particularly, uh, in European capitals, with this assumption that Qatar houses terrorists and it's a benefactor and a sponsor of a terrorist organization like Hamas. But we all know that Hamas wouldn't be here if the Qataris hadn't gotten a green light from the United States.
So why has the United States given Qatar that green light?
Mehran Kamrava: The fact that Hamas is here enables the Americans to keep close eyes on it and keep close tabs on it. Whereas if Hamas were in Damascus or Tehran or somewhere in Lebanon, it'd be much more difficult for the U.S. to have the same degree of awareness of Hamas movements and what the political leadership at least is up to. One thing that I think is quite important to keep in mind is that at a larger level, Qatari foreign policy tends to be extremely pragmatic and non-ideological. As a small state, Qatar cannot afford to be ideological. And so it’s always been extremely pragmatic. And that pragmatism is driven by not only regime survival, but national interests. And if Qatar at some point realizes that housing Hamas is contrary to its national interests, or undermines its security arrangements with the United States, it would, of course, get rid of Hamas or ask Hamas leadership to leave and go elsewhere.
Is there something inherently wrong with this kind of “pragmatism” if it means you align yourself with whatever force is the most beneficial at this particular moment? Journalist Steve Clemons put a version of this question to Qatar’s lead negotiator with Hamas at the global security conference:
Steve Clemons: I think one of the criticisms that some have of Qatar and the role you play is that you're not out there judging right from wrong among some of the parties you're dealing with. How do you navigate that and how do you tell the critics of Qatar why that's important?
Mohammed Bin Abdulaziz Al-Khulaifi: Steven, we totally distinguish between our pure political position when it comes to the cases that are surrounding us and our mediation efforts when it comes to the scope that we have already designed for that specific mediation. When it comes to the political position, we're standing with the rule of law. Now, when it comes to the mediation, we are also following the international law. We design our work very professionally and we make sure that we illustrate to each party their obligations and their rights when it comes to those mediation efforts. Therefore, we cannot really, uh, um, mix up these two things together when it comes to the political position. History always teaches us, Steven, that referring to violence or, uh, uh, the threat of using, of using violence is never going to resolve the disputes. And, and the best methods that we have selected is really to refer those matters to more diplomacy and peaceful methods of resolving disputes.
But journalist Steve Clemons had good reason to ask: this theme comes up again and again about Qatar. So whose side are you on? Is it ethical to be kind of agnostic when the Middle East is on fire with a raging war in Gaza, a looming war potentially between Lebanese Hezbollah and Israel, and an Iranian proxy shooting missiles at ships in the Red Sea that has greatly interfered with global trade? At least one American university in Qatar — Texas A&M — seems to have decided that it’s not comfortable with this ambiguity. They recently announced they’ll be pulling out of Qatar citing vaguely worded concerns about “heightened regional instability.
Some say you can read Qatar’s true point of view via Al Jazeera, the news organization that’s funded by Qatar and was started by a bunch of former BBC journalists back in 1996.
Rami Khouri: They see the world from the point of view of the, of the voiceless or the, the people on the ground. They say, ‘We go cover stories from where the bombs are falling, not from where the bombs were sent.’
Rami Khouri, the journalist who I met up with in Doha, is an occasional contributor to Al Jazeera’s website and a frequent guest on its air.
Peter Bergen: This decision to fund and, and house Al Jazeera doesn't come without political costs for the Qataris. They didn't have to do it. On the other hand, it is the most credible source of independent news coverage on the television side, and arguably on the internet side anywhere in the Arab world. So how unusual is it to have a quite independent and also muscular media organization based in a Gulf state?
Rami Khouri: It's very unusual. It's unique. There's nobody else like it. Others tried. I remember when Jazeera started. Others, Dubai's Abu Dhabi, people in Jordan tried it, people in Lebanon and other places. But none of them could achieve the quality of Jazeera. And none of them really had the freedom to do what Jazeera was doing.
Peter Bergen: And does it come with a political cost?
Rami Khouri: It comes with the same cost that any institution like it living in a non-democratic country has. In Qatar this means obviously the same as in every country in the Arab world and in most of the world that you don't report on the life and, uh, policies and whatever of the, of the ruling powers, whether it's a ruling family or a, or a wider power elite.
I also spoke to Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a research fellow at the pro-Israel Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a research institute based in D.C. He says that Qatar is actually more radical than it wants the international community to believe — and his critique starts with Al Jazeera.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain: Let me put it this way. It's just, uh, spreading ideas that I think don't help improve things in the region.
Peter Bergen: Meaning what?
Hussain Abdul-Hussain: Meaning the language they use. So, for example, when they're reporting on the war in Gaza, they describe those killed on the Palestinian side, whoever they are, as martyrs elevated to heaven. But when they're reporting on the Israelis, they're just killed.
We checked on this, and Abdul-Hussain is largely right, when it comes to Al Jazeera’s Arabic language content which is distinct from its English-language content. That said, “martyr” is a relatively commonly used term in news coverage in the Arab world.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain: And I think this kind of language, it's not only not objective, but it also makes these ideas sink in the, you know, the head of, of their audience. And that's not good. The very least they could do just, you know, stand, at an equal distance from both sides and just either say both are martyrs or both are killed. But just, you know, don't pick sides in this fight.
Israel recently kicked Al Jazeera out of the country in reaction to their coverage of the Gaza War.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Benjamin Netanyahu has said that his cabinet has voted unanimously on Sunday to shut down Al Jazeera offices in Israel.
Peter Bergen: Well as you know, almost all media in the Middle East is owned by, uh, governments or by, um, people who are close to the governments.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain: Correct.
Peter Bergen: It does seem to me that Al Jazeera, particularly since it was founded by a bunch of former BBC Arabic speakers, has tended to be more independent than other news organizations in the Middle East.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain: I don't think the other, uh, channels or newspapers are pretending to stand at a distance from their own funders and governments. Al Jazeera pretends.
Peter Bergen: So what do you make of Qatar's role in the world, in particular, being at the center of this potential ceasefire agreement with Hamas?
Hussain Abdul-Hussain: I disagree with their school, uh, about the what's going on in Gaza. I don't support a ceasefire, and I think a ceasefire is a prescription for future war. I think if we if you want to be serious, we have to advocate for peace. And if you want to advocate for peace, we have to get Hamas to say that they want peace, not a ceasefire or, you know, recognition of Palestinian states on West Bank and Gaza without recognizing Israel. So if Hamas wants to surrender their arms and advocate for peace like the PLO did before them, I'll be, you know, the first person to support that. But until that happens, you know, I think ceasefire is crisis management. It will not solve the problem. And if in a few years, there'll be another round, probably rounds of fighting.
Peter Bergen: What about the political wing of Hamas, which is, as you know, to a large degree based in Doha in Qatar and through which these negotiations about hostage releases and ceasefires have been conducted. I mean, is it a bad thing that they're in Doha or a good thing or it's a neutral thing or what?
Hussain Abdul-Hussain: I don't really look at them as a such a political wing. I mean, you know, granted that they're not in Gaza and fighting, and now it seems that they're not, they're not calling the shots as much as they sometimes claim. So everyone now understands that whenever there's a proposal, they go looking for Sinwar. They have to find him, and sometimes they have to wait for days until they hear from him back.
Peter Bergen: Sinwar being the military leader of Hamas who's deep underground in Gaza.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain: Yes. So, uh, so it doesn't look to me that these guys are actually running things. But I don't think it's a positive, a net positive idea to have people advocating for the destruction of the state of Israel to be, uh, just enjoying their time in Doha and luxury. I mean—
Peter Bergen: If they were forced out by say the United States, or Israel, or some combination, or the EU, wouldn't they just go to Syria or Iran and be even harder to deal with?
Hussain Abdul-Hussain: Look, I'm, I'm not a fan of forcing anyone anywhere. We can just ask people to change their behavior. And then if they don't, then, you know, we, we think of other alternatives.
Actually, it seems that Qatar has done something a little bit like this in the recent past: leveraged this power to kick Hamas out of the country. In April, the group's leaders were forced to relocate to Turkey temporarily when talks with Israel stalled
Peter Bergen: Qatar has been funding Gaza in one way or another for years now with the encouragement of the Israeli government, the acquiescence of the U.S. government. So did that turn out to be a giant mistake keeping Hamas afloat?
Hussain Abdul-Hussain: It's a terrible, bad idea to give money to organizations like Hamas or Hezbollah.
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
Some may criticize Qatar for playing both sides of the street. But in the end, it seems that the United States, Hamas, and Israel all need this tiny country to end the seemingly endless war in Gaza. And then, a coalition of countries will be needed to rebuild Gaza. Here’s political scientist Mehran Kamrava:
Mehran Kamrava: The destruction of Gaza has been so thorough. The devastation has been so complete that it will take decades and, much, much international effort on everybody's part to reconstruct Gaza and to put back together the lives that have been broken forever. And of course, Qatar has a role to play in that, but Qatar is by no means an only actor that can be consequential. It cannot be consequential by itself.
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If you are interested in some of the issues we discussed in this episode we recommend Mehran Kamrava’s book, Qatar: Small State, Big Politics and Rory Miller’s book Desert Kingdoms to Global Powers: The Rise of the Arab Gulf, both of whom teach at Georgtown’s Qatar campus. And, The Arabs: A History by Eugene Rogan, which is available on Audible.
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Audible Executive Producer: Lara Regan Kleinschmidt.
Special thanks to Marlon Calbi, Allison Weber, and Vanessa Harris.
Copyright 2024 by Audible Originals, LLC.
Sound recording copyright 2024 by Audible Originals, LLC.
Please note: This episode includes excerpts from broadcasts by BBC News and The Guardian.
