The perplexing and complex role played by Qatar on the Middle East’s diplomatic stage has come into sharp focus in recent weeks. On September 9, Israel carried out strikes on the capital of Doha targeting the leadership of Hamas, which has been based there since 2012. Yet Qatar has played a significant role in negotiations to resolve the Israel-Hamas conflict the last two years, and just this week Qatar joined other Arab nations in pressing Hamas to accept a peace deal proposed by U.S. President Donald Trump.
The tiny, gas-rich emirate projects itself, through both its media outlets and less open channels, as an ally to all, uniquely able to mediate between governments and their insurgent enemies because it maintains channels of communication with all players. That carefully cultivated image prompted widespread incredulousness when Israel targeted the Hamas leaders in Doha. Why had Israel carried out a military action on the soil of the country engaged in mediation? Didn’t this run counter to the stated central Israeli goal of securing the release of the remaining Israeli hostages currently in Hamas’ hands? A closer look at Qatar’s regional strategy and pattern of behavior, however, renders the Israeli action rather more comprehensible.
The Emirate of Qatar pursues a curious, multilayered, and sophisticated regional strategy—but conflict resolution and peaceful development are not the basis of that agenda. Rather, Qatar has pursued a strategy of offering substantial and significant support to insurgent Islamist movements across the Middle East. Qatar significantly aids these movements—most prominently Hamas but also the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham organization in Syria, and similar movements in Libya and Yemen—in achieving their goals. These groups share a number of clear commonalities: All are committed to a version of Sunni political Islam, and all are anti-democratic and anti-Western in their ideology.
Qatar also has, through its influential satellite channel al-Jazeera, offered support to Islamist and Arab nationalist themes and organizations. The broad appeal of al-Jazeera—the network is available to 350 million people in more than 150 countries—and the total control of its themes and editorial line by the Qatari state, make it a soft-power weapon for Doha’s interests. This logic reached its height in the Islamist-tinged popular uprisings of the “Arab Spring” period (2010-15), when al-Jazeera’s enthusiastic fanning of the flames of revolt had real consequences. In Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Yemen, al-Jazeera first offered extensive coverage of protests, and then focused on Islamist elements among the protesters, echoing the Qatari state agenda and helping Islamist elements and movements to achieve a dominant position. One analyst has described the channel as the “primary ideological and communication network” for the Muslim Brotherhood at that time.
The brilliance and subtlety of Qatari strategy is that Doha has supported these movements while at the same time benefiting from close ties to the West. Alongside its domiciling of Hamas and Taliban leadership, Qatar also hosts the largest U.S air base in the Middle East, at Al Udeid, where about 10,000 U.S. Air Force personnel are stationed. Doha, in a strategy aptly described as combining the attributes of the “arsonist and the firefighter,” seeks to leverage its support for enemies of the West into greater influence and improved relations with the West itself. This sounds paradoxical, but Qatar makes it work.
In a practice reminiscent of a traditional protection racket, Doha will first help to improve the capacities of a malign actor, then offer the target of that actor its own assistance in mediation. That is how Qatar played a central role in contacts between the U.S. and the Afghan Taliban, leading to the Doha agreement of 2020. This element also underlies Qatar’s role in mediation between Israel and Hamas.
It’s worth noting that other Gulf states have taken a diametrically opposed route in their approach to the geopolitics of the region. The United Arab Emirates, for example, has established itself as one of the most sophisticated and implacable enemies of Islamist movements and trends (with the exception of those trends that preach loyalty to existing power structures). The UAE is the most coherent and implacable opponent of Muslim Brotherhood-associated movements across the region—in Yemen, Syria, Egypt, Libya, and the Palestinian territories.
And so the natural question to be asked is: What does Qatar gain from supporting malign actors? And is its motivation purely utilitarian in nature, or is there an element of genuine ideological or religious commitment behind it?
For starters, Qatar enjoys outsize influence as a result of the approach it has pioneered. It is, for example, impossible to imagine the key role currently played by Qatar in Israel-Hamas negotiations without the crucial element of Doha’s relations with and support for Hamas. It is also worth noting that identification with and assistance to the revolutionary trends in the Arab and Islamic world, which in many ways have the “ownership” of powerful religious and nationalist symbols, helps to legitimize the ultrawealthy Qatari monarchy, insulating it against any possible challenges from within its own population.
This instrumental aspect of Qatari strategy should not, however, lead to the conclusion that Doha’s motives are entirely cynical or lacking in genuine conviction. Qatar offered refuge to Muslim Brotherhood activists fleeing political oppression in Egypt and Syria as early as the 1950s and 1960s. These individuals, who often brought skills needed by the emirate, integrated into it and helped to shape its cultural and intellectual climate, adding the greater sophistication of modern Islamist ideas to the existing ultraconservative Islamic atmosphere of the emirate, and in so doing playing significant roles particularly in the fields of education and public administration.
There is a third, less immediately visible element to Qatar’s power projection. Qatar sits on one of the world’s largest natural gas fields. Using the enormous wealth deriving from this good fortune, Doha invests heavily in lobbying and influence-building efforts in the West. According to a recent study, Qatar has spent nearly $250 million since 2016 on 88 FARA-registered lobbying and public relations firms in the U.S. Qatar’s efforts cross party lines, and the study noted that “Three cabinet-level members in the administration — Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin — have all previously held consultancy or lobbying positions on Qatar’s behalf.”
Evidence suggests that this ability to use wealth to gain influence in Western political systems manifests itself elsewhere, too, though tracing the lines of such activity is not easy. In the case of Israel, Jerusalem agreed in the pre-October 2023 period to Qatar supplying $30 million per month to Hamas-controlled Gaza. At the time, the Israeli political and security establishment believed that Hamas had been deterred and sought mainly to consolidate its rule in Gaza.
It is well known in Israel that a number of officials, having completed their service, commenced work with Qatari companies in the security field. The Israeli authorities are currently investigating a number of former officials whom they suspect of working to further Qatar’s interests in Israel, having established contacts with Qatari agencies during their time in government service.
In addition, there is a trial underway in Israel, in which three former senior officials of the Prime Minister’s Bureau are accused of multiple offenses related to their lobbying work for Qatar, conducted at the same time that they were employed in the highest sanctum of Israeli policymaking.
The extent to which the close links between both serving and former Israeli officials and Qatar might have facilitated Qatar’s ability to promote particular messages among the Israeli elite and public, and the extent to which this might have served, deliberately or inadvertently, to help create the flawed and complacent assumptions regarding Hamas which made possible the massacres of October 7, 2023, awaits further investigation. But the reality of Qatar’s myriad links to elite Israeli circles appears undeniable.
What all this adds up to is that Qatar has in recent years built up its own power and influence through supporting violent radical organizations, fomenting instability through the masterful employment of propaganda, parlaying these practices into influence with the peoples and countries negatively affected by them, and apparently corrupting democratic political systems from within.
Israel’s September 9 raid on Doha will not bring those practices to an end. It will probably not even bring a close to Qatar’s own malign influence within the Israeli policymaking world itself. It may, however, represent the first act in which, for a moment at least, a Western-aligned country recognized the role Qatar is playing, and chose to reject the assumptions that Qatar wants the democratic world to accept. From this point of view, it is to be welcomed. Hopefully further action will follow, and not only by Israel.
