It’s over. No, not the fighting in Gaza, not the struggle with Hamas, and not the fallout from Tuesday’s attack in Qatar.
What’s over is the game of duplicity, bribery, and subversion played for years by a Lilliputian sheikdom that used its undeserved wealth to radicalize Muslims, destabilize the Middle East, and corrupt the world.
That game is now over.
At this writing, the results of the attack in Doha are unclear. However, in terms of its meaning for Qatar’s international standing, that doesn’t matter. What matters in this regard is that Qatar has been unmasked as what it has been all along – a terror sponsor that should be treated as such by the civilized world.
SMALLER THAN Puerto Rico, the Qatari peninsula is home to hardly 3 million people, 90% of them foreign workers. The Qatari citizenry, an estimated 300,000, is less than half of Luxembourg’s. Even so, like Grand Fenwick, the tiny princedom that declared war on the US in The Mouse the Roared, Qatar took on Egypt, a country of 100 million and the leader of the Arab world.
The method was cunning. Having doled out from its coffers $137 million, Qatar created a cable channel, al Jazeera, and used it to attack the Egyptian government. Gullible Westerners praised the novelty as an embrace of democracy, ignoring al Jazeera’s failure to cover Qatar itself. Journalism, freedom and democracy, not to mention truth, were the last things this venture’s paymasters cared about. What they cared about was chaos, which their new toy helped sow.
But why sow chaos? What’s Qatar’s endgame, people wondered.
Some thought that what drove Qatar was vanity. Sitting on a heap of petrodollars – a quarter-of-a-trillion in gross domestic product – the Qataris wanted to buy prestige, went this theory. That’s why they worked hard to host the world’s largest athletic event, soccer’s World Cup, a venture for which the emirate was patently ineligible, but still fell in its lap, thanks to an estimated $150 million in bribes.
Impressive though that investment and its yield were, and corrosive though its effect on international sports was, buying prestige is not the engine of Qatar’s global meddling. The real engine is Islamist zeal, which Qatar’s leaders have consistently financed in multiple arenas.
Qatar helped finance al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Nusra in Syria, and Hamas in Gaza. It served as Iran’s collaborator, and – as all now understand – it sheltered the architects of the worst anti-Jewish massacre since the Holocaust.
While doing all this, Qatar pretended to be pro-Western. It hobnobbed with Israel, sponsored European soccer clubs, and hosted the largest American military base in the Middle East, with some 120 jets and 11,000 troops.
Now all this must come to an end.
WASHINGTON’S role in this week’s attack is unclear. At this writing, America is denying involvement in, or even advance knowledge of, the attack. That’s understandable, if unconvincing.
With such a heavy military presence in Qatar, the IDF must have alerted the American command there that 15 Israeli jets were coming to visit. US President Donald Trump’s tweet 48 hours before the attack, that he was giving Hamas a “last warning” to accept his end-of-war formula, only bolsters the impression that he knew of the attack, and was smoke-screening its approach.
Yet even if this attack was waged with America totally in the dark, Washington must ask itself whether Qatar is worth its investment.
Qatar has been dishonest all along. It made believe that in the fight between civilization and jihadism, it was neutral. It wasn’t neutral. It was on the jihadis’ side. That comes not from us Israelis, but from the Egyptians. Qatar financed the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and made al Jazeera spread the narratives of the Egyptian government’s Islamist enemy.
This is besides Qatar’s share in the past two years’ antisemitic events across the US. And that is, of course, besides Qatar’s financing over the years of Hamas’s military buildup, propaganda, and payroll.
Qatar, in short, is not America’s friend. It is its enemy, just like it’s the enemy of America’s Arab allies, the Jewish people, and the Jewish state. And it’s not just a political enemy. It’s a civilizational enemy, a corrupting enemy, one that contaminated the free world’s politics, academia, media, and sports. That’s why the attitude toward Qatar must change, thus:
FIRST, AMERICA’S military bases in Qatar should be relocated, maybe to Egypt. Qatar does not deserve, and cannot be trusted, to host them.
Second, Qatari investments in the West should be investigated, especially in universities, where Qatari money was never meant to advance the Western values of free thought and independent research, but to sabotage them, as last year’s events on US campuses made plain.
Third, Qatari businesses should be sanctioned. Qatari leaders should be sanctioned, like the jihadi terrorists they financed, and Qatari companies seeking Western assets – from skyscrapers and airlines, to sports clubs and hotels – should be turned away.
Lastly, Qatar should be excluded from Gaza’s reconstruction when this multi-billion-dollar project’s time finally comes.
The 54-year tale of Qatari independence has been a tragedy, twice.
Psychologically, Qatar was a victim of the Sudden Wealth Syndrome, the curse of the lottery winner whose unexpected treasure makes him do very stupid things with it. And politically, Qatar epitomized the Arab world’s lost century, an era in which some 400 million Arabs remained mostly destitute despite owning much of the world’s petroleum and gas.
Arab petrodollars that could have been used to educate, empower, and enrich millions of Arabs from Morocco to Iraq were instead spent on extravaganzas like the World Cup, vanity purchases like London’s Ritz and Savoy, and murder machines like al-Qaeda and Hamas.
Will the world divorce Qatar tomorrow morning? Of course not. Israel, however, just did.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sefarim 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.