Israel puts Qatar in the crosshairs as Hamas reasserts itself in Gaza.
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The anti-Qatar campaign accuses the Gulf state, of
forging relations with problematic groups and supporting the likes of Hamas and
the Taliban as part of its conflict mediation policy, even though those
relationships were encouraged
by the United States and, in the case of Hamas, Israel.
The stepped-up efforts coincide
with Israel effectively walking away from Qatari, Egyptian, and US efforts to
negotiate a pro-longed ceasefire in the four-month-old Gaza war and a prisoner
exchange that would free the remaining 136 Hamas-held Israeli hostages and the
bodies of captives killed during the war.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks during a joint
press conference with Qatar's Prime Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister
Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, at Diwan Annex, in Doha, Qatar, Feb. 6,
2024.
Hamas abducted some 250 people during its October 7
attack on Israel. Approximately 120 hostages were released in November during a
one-week Qatar-mediated truce in exchange for 240 Palestinians held in Israeli
prisons.
The anti-Qatar campaign scored a tangible success earlier
this month with Texas
A&M University’s announcement that it was shutting down
its two-decade-old Qatar campus.
Handsomely funded by Qatar Foundation (QF), Texas A&M
is one of eight foreign universities, including Georgetown, Northwestern, Well
Cornell Medicine, and Carnegie Mellon, alongside Qatar’s Hamid bin Khalifa
University, with operations in the Gulf state’s Education City.
In a statement, the foundation said Texas A&M’s
decision was “influenced by a disinformation campaign aimed at harming the
interests of QF... It is deeply disappointing that a globally respected
academic institution like Texas A&M University has fallen victim to such a
campaign and allowed politics to infiltrate its decision-making processes.”
Texas A&M said its decision was “due to heightened
instability in the Middle East.”
The closure followed the publication of a report
by the New York-based, pro-Israel Institute for the Study of Global
Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) alleging that Texas A&M
had shared sensitive nuclear energy and weapons development research with the
Qatari government. Texas A&M denied the allegations.
ISGAP report on Qatar and Texas
A&M. Photo: isgap.org
The report said Qatar paid Texas A&M more than US$1
billion for the rights to all intellectual and material assets developed in
more than 500 technology projects in sensitive fields such as nuclear science,
artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, robotics, biotechnology, and advanced
weapons development.
"Allowing Qatar, with its links to terrorist
organizations, to have complete control of this research through IP ownership
creates unacceptable risks of technology transfer and appropriation of
breakthroughs with military applications," the report warned. It suggested
the advanced technology could find its way to militant groups like Hamas and
Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah militia.
More sanguine Israeli scholars argue that “the goal
(of Qatari) investments is not necessarily to steal secrets
like the Chinese, but to acquire influence. What's important to Qatar is how it
can influence American policy through soft power. I'm less afraid of technology
theft – I see things like the partnership with Texas A&M as a Qatari
investment,” said Yoel Guzansky, a former head of Iran and the Gulf at Israel's
National Security Council and Middle under three prime ministers and a Middle
East scholar who wrote his dissertation on Qatar’s hedging policies.
Conveniently, Israel, as it demonises Qatar, buries its
own engagement with Hamas as well as the fact that Egypt long saw the group as
an asset in countering Islamist militants in the Sinai Peninsula.
The Israeli campaign is not that far in time from the
days that Mr. Netanyahu asked Qatar to fund the salaries of Gaza’s Hamas
administration and some reconstruction after five earlier wars.
Mr. Guzansky noted that his efforts as the head of
Harpoon, a secret Israeli unit created to foil money transfers to militants and
Iran, fell on Mr. Netanyahu’s deaf ears. “His policy changed to the transfer of
money from Qatar to the Gaza Strip. And then the international system stopped
blocking Hamas' money, because they said to us, 'If you won't handle it, why
should we?' That started in 2014,” Mr. Guzansky said.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), founded
by Yigal Carmon, a former advisor to Israel’s West Bank and Gaza occupation
authority and Prime Ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin, has produced in
recent months a series of reports designed to bolster Israel’s campaign against
Qatar.
In MEMRI’s
latest broadside, Mr. Carmon asserted, echoing Mr. Netanyahu,
that the hostage negotiations were faltering “because Qatar is not pressuring
Hamas. It sees itself as a mere go-between. Qatar isn't pressuring Hamas
despite the fact that in reality, Qatar is the lifeline of Hamas – its hope,
its future, its power to continue to fight and to hold the hostages.”
Ignoring that Hamas was founded in 1986 in
Israeli-occupied and besieged Gaza at a time that Israel tacitly saw the group
as an anti-dote to Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Mr.
Carmon charged that “Qatar built Hamas from a small organization into a
military and political power. It took pride in its training of ‘Hamas security
officials.’… Without Qatar, Hamas is doomed."
To be fair, Mr. Carmon’s tirade also took Mr. Netanyahu
to task for allowing Qatari funds to flow to Hamas.
Mr. Netanyahu “violated Israeli and international
anti-terrorism laws by allowing the money from Qatar, a state sponsor of
terrorism, to reach Hamas, recognized as a terrorist organization across the
West – thereby transforming this violation into a policy – until it exploded in
his face,” Mr. Carmon said.
On Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu asserted that “the release of
hostages can be achieved through strong military action and tough negotiations,
very tough negotiations. That tough position has to involve the exertion of
pressure. And the exertion of pressure is not merely on Hamas itself, but on those
who can exert pressure on Hamas, beginning with Qatar.”
In response, Qatar foreign ministry spokesman Majed
Al-Ansari called on the prime minister “to focus
on the path of negotiations that serves the security of the region
and end the ongoing tragedy of the war instead of issuing such statements
whenever it suits his narrow political agenda.”
Mr. Netanyahu’s hard line in the ceasefire negotiations
and effort to discredit the mediator has as much to do with domestic Israeli
politics as with not wanting to hand Hamas a victory when Israel has yet to
show substantial progress in destroying the group not only militarily but also
politically and organisationally.
Hamas’ ability to maintain its position in the ceasefire
and prisoner exchange negotiations highlights Israel’s failure so far to wipe
the group off the face of the earth.
US intelligence estimated earlier this month that Israel
has killed or captured at most 30 per cent of Hamas’ 30,000-strong fighting
force. The Israeli military said in early January that it had killed
or captured up to 9,000 Hamas fighters.
Adding fuel to the fire, Hamas
has resurfaced in parts of Gaza from which Israeli forces
have withdrawn in the past month in the belief that they had eliminated the
group’s presence in parts of the Strip.
A man sits on the rubble as others wander among debris of buildings that
were hit by Israeli airstrikes in the northern Gaza Strip. Photo: Abed Khaled /
Associated Press
In Gaza city, the Strip’s largest urban area, Hamas has
recently deployed uniformed and plainclothes police officers to prevent the
looting of shops and houses abandoned by residents and restore law and order
and paid salaries to some of its civil servants.
In doing so, Hamas, on the back of its governance
infrastructure and charity network, positions itself as the only entity willing
and able to administer Gaza and provide essential services in a wasteland in
which Israel curtails the flow of desperately needed aid and seemingly
systematically destroys Gaza’s civilian infrastructure.
Hamas’ effort to return a semblance of governance
exploits Israel’s Catch-22.
Focussed on destroying the group and hesitant to shoulder
responsibility for providing aid and basic services as it refuses to lay out
its vision for Gaza once the guns fall silent, Israel is caught between a rock
and a hard place.
It is damned if it assumes responsibility for governance
of the Strip, 19 years after Israeli troops withdrew and imposed an
Egyptian-supported blockade of the Strip, and damned for a war that makes Gaza unlivable
in
violation of international law.
Further complicating things, Israel’s demonisation of
Qatar is paralleled by an Israeli campaign
to shutter the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA), the
foremost aid organisation operating in Gaza and the Strip’s third largest
employer.
Palestinians carry bags of flour and other
basic food products received as aid to poor families, at the United Nations
Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) distribution center, in
the Rafah refugee camp, southern Gaza Strip. Photo: SAID KHATIB / AFP
At least 18 countries last month suspended UNWRA funding
after Israel and the United States asserted that 12 of UNWRA’s 13,000 Gaza
employees had participated in Hamas’ October 7 attacks.
By refusing to engage in Gaza’s civilian governance,
while denying other non-hostile actors a role in post-conflict reconstruction,
Israel is providing
Hamas with the silver platter of legitimacy that it needs to survive the
conflict,” said peace and security scholar Rob Geist Pinfold.
Israel’s anti-Qatar campaign is closely linked to
post-war governance in Gaza and the West Bank. Beyond the ceasefire and
prisoner exchange talks, the campaign is designed to thwart initial Qatari
attempts to mediate between Hamas and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’
Palestine Authority.
A reconciliation between the two feuding entities would
make a Palestine Authority-led administration of post-war Gaza and the West
Bank more feasible.
Mr. Abbas last week reportedly
endorsed a potential Qatari mediation effort and the formation of a
technocratic government in Gaza and the West Bank in talks in Doha with Qatari
Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.
PLO Executive Committee member Ramzi Rabah last week told
Independent Arabia TV that Hamas willing to join the PLO, the Palestine
Authority’s backbone, endorse a Palestinian state alongside Israel, and support
a technocratic government without demanding that the group be part of it.
The issue of governance in war-ravaged Gaza as well as
the West Bank and East Jerusalem shot on Monday to the top of the agenda with
the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) historic week-long hearings on the
legality of Israel’s 57-year-long occupation of Palestinian lands conquered
during the 1967 Middle East war.
The
International Court start hearings on Israel’s occupation of Palestinians lands. UN
Photo/ICJ-CIJ/Frank van Beek
The hearings are in response to a December 2022 United Nations General
Assembly request for an ICJ review of Israel's "occupation,
settlement and annexation ... including measures aimed at altering the
demographic composition, character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem,
and from its adoption of related discriminatory legislation and measures.”
The Assembly asked the ICJ to issue a non-binding
advisory opinion on how Israeli policies “affect the legal status of the
occupation" and what legal consequences arise for countries and the United
Nations from this status.
Fifty-two countries and three international organisations
are scheduled to present on the Israeli occupation, which the Palestinians and
much of the international community deem illegal.
It’s the largest number of parties to participate in any
ICJ case since the court was established in 1945.
Israel has opted to submit a written rather than an oral
presentation in a case that is separate from ongoing
proceedings at South Africa’s behest on whether its conduct of the Gaza war
amounts to genocide.
“The case will put before the court a litany of
accusations and allegations and grievances which are probably going
to be uncomfortable and embarrassing for Israel,
given the war and the already very polarized international environment,” said
Israeli law professor Yuval Shany.
Palestine Authority foreign ministry official Omar
Awadallah spelt out how uncomfortable and embarrassing the case should be.
“We want to hear new words from the court. They’ve had to
consider the word genocide in the South Africa case. Now we want them to
consider apartheid,” Mr. Awadallah said.
Israelis fear that the fallout of an ICJ condemnation of
the Israeli occupation could go beyond words.
"If, for example, in its opinion, the court rules
that settlements constitute an international war crime, countries
could stop selling arms to Israel, as a court in the
Netherlands has already recently ordered. Israeli goods are liable to be
labeled and personal sanctions against settlers, such as were imposed in the
United States, could be stepped up,” said Israeli lawyer Yuval Sasson who
specialises in international law.
Earlier this month, the United States Biden sanctioned
four Israeli settlers accused of attacking Palestinians in the
West Bank.
Perhaps, most importantly, an ICJ designation of the
Israeli occupation as illegal, despite not being legally binding, would create
a legal framework for negotiations that would strengthen the Palestinians’
ability to reject Israeli and US efforts to limit a future Palestinian state’s
independence and sovereignty.
Michael
Lynk, a former UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian
Territories, noted that an ICJ designation would put the United States on the
spot.
“This would
go back to the UN General Assembly. The Assembly will try to commit the
Security Council to take action to end the occupation. President Biden has
talked throughout his presidency about a two-state solution. This will be the
litmus test of the US commitment to international law and human rights,” Mr.
Lynk said.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior
Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of
International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.
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