When the longtime political chief of Hamas was assassinated in late July 2024, it didn’t simply go away the complete Center East on edge. It additionally created a political headache in Qatar.
That’s as a result of the demise of Ismail Haniyeh, the results of an obvious Israeli operation, struck a blow to Doha’s already sputtering diplomatic efforts within the Center east.
The Gulf state has lengthy been the staging floor for negotiations involving Israelis and Palestinians, together with Haniyeh, who lived in Qatar. However latest criticism from the U.S. and Israel for, of their view, failing to place sufficient stress on Hamas had led Qatar’s leaders to query its position.
After which got here Haniyeh’s demise.
“How can mediation succeed when one social gathering assassinates the negotiator on the opposite aspect?” contemplated Qatar’s prime minister and prime diplomat, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani. Israel is extensively believed to be behind the assassination, though no declare of accountability has been made.
As an skilled on Gulf politics, I imagine bin Abdulrahman’s query is a legitimate one. As the primary anniversary of the Oct. 7 assault in Israel approaches, Qatari officers face a problem. Mediation has produced diminishing returns – each for the opponents and for Qatar itself. However shifting away from mediation would symbolize a seismic shift for Qatar, which has put it on the coronary heart of its international coverage for many years.
Diplomacy as coverage
Qatar is a small state in a unstable neighborhood. Over the previous 45 years, the area has skilled a number of interstate wars and intervals of revolutionary upheaval. All through that point, successive generations of Qatari leaders have regarded towards diplomacy and mediation as a approach to advance the nation’s pursuits.
Certainly, Qatar’s structure, in impact since 2004, requires a international coverage “primarily based on the precept of encouraging peaceable decision of worldwide disputes.”
Such a proper dedication to dispute decision marks Qatar as distinct from most of its Gulf friends. However the strategy is rooted in a realistic calculation of how and the place a small nation can finest train leverage in regional and international coverage.
On this manner, Qatari officers have labored as mediators for 20 years.
Initially, they discovered success, serving to resolve in 2008 a very intractable political disaster in Lebanon, which seemed to be heading to civil conflict. The breakthrough in Lebanon and a two-year stint on the United Nations Safety Council in 2006 and 2007 helped put Qatar on the diplomatic map.
However Qatar’s negotiating efforts haven’t all the time labored out. Qatari officers didn’t facilitate breakthroughs between warring Sudanese factions in Darfur in 2011 and between the Houthis and the central authorities in Yemen’s decadelong civil conflict since 2014.
A lot of the early mediation efforts have been led by the veteran international minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani, who was additionally appointed prime minister in 2007.
Bin Jassim engaged in a personalised type of policymaking primarily based on his huge vary of worldwide contacts and his capacity to lean on Qatari entities, such because the Qatar Funding Authority, in his diplomatic efforts.
Evolving coverage
Bin Jassim stepped down as each prime and international minister in June 2013 as a part of a rigorously deliberate handover of energy to the present emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.
By this time, the Qatari management was going through a backlash from neighbors similar to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates over what they considered as Qatari help or sympathy for Islamist actions in the course of the multinational collection of uprisings often called the Arab Spring.
In 2017, the Saudis and Emiratis, together with Bahrain and Egypt, lower diplomatic ties with Qatar and accused Doha – with out proof – of supporting regional terrorist teams.
However such criticism didn’t deter Qatar from its coverage of mediation as diplomacy. Moderately, within the decade for the reason that 2013 political transition in Doha, Qatari mediation has developed and expanded. In 2023, a brand new place of Minister of State for Worldwide Cooperation was created throughout the Overseas Ministry, giving larger institutional depth {and professional} functionality to policymaking.
Qatar’s mediation efforts have additionally developed away from the unilateral actions involving Islamist teams that raised regional considerations in the course of the Arab Spring.
As an alternative, Qatari officers have acted on the request of different nations to function potential mediators.
Jacquelyn Martin/AFP through Getty Photos)
On this manner, the Gulf state labored intensively with the U.S. and representatives from the Taliban in a course of that culminated within the 2020 Doha Settlement that set a timeline for U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
It equally labored with Israeli officers to facilitate monetary and humanitarian help for the Gaza Strip within the 5 years previous to the Hamas-led assaults of Oct. 7.
Hamas retreats to the tunnels
However since that assault and the Israeli operation in Gaza that adopted, Qatari mediation has had solely restricted success.
It was instrumental in negotiating the short-term cease-fire in November, however combating rapidly resumed and the devastation of Gaza intensified quickly after.
In the meantime, each U.S. and Israeli politicians have attacked Qatar for persevering with dialogue with Hamas.
That criticism led the Qatari prime minister to warn in April that Doha could reassess its position in Gaza in consequence.
4 months on, the killing of Haniyeh has narrowed nonetheless additional the pathway for additional diplomacy. Haniyeh, like his predecessor as head of the Hamas Political Bureau, Khaled Mashal, had a base in Doha.
The person appointed to succeed Haniyeh in that position, hardliner Yahya Sinwar, is believed to be in a tunnel in Gaza and can’t fairly hope to be in Doha given the present circumstances.
Following Haniyeh’s demise, the White Home did attain out to Qatar to thank the nation for its mediating efforts, but it surely’s more and more troublesome to see how Qatar can dealer any breakthrough.
Talks will proceed. Israeli and Egyptian officers met in Cairo on Aug. 3, after Haniyeh’s assassination, with out Qatari illustration. However negotiations broke down after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly imposed new calls for.
De-escalating Iran tensions
With the dominant view in Doha that Israeli management merely isn’t keen to interact in good-faith talks, nonetheless much less attain a cease-fire deal, officers in Qatar are more likely to concentrate on mitigating any Iranian response in opposition to Israel. This started with an emergency assembly of the Group of Islamic Convention members, together with Iran, in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia on Aug. 7.
With no viable political technique for a Gaza cease-fire at the moment in place, de-escalating tensions involving Iran – somewhat than making an attempt to dealer peace between Palestinians and Israelis – will dominate Qatar’s strategy within the days and weeks forward.
