The Decibel - Qatar’s behind-the-scenes role in the Israel-Hamas war

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

The Israel-Hamas war is now in its sixth week and fighting is intensifying inside Gaza. On Tuesday, Palestinians trapped inside Gaza’s biggest hospital dug a mass grave to bury patients who died. Israel is encircling the hospital as they believe it sits atop an underground Hamas headquarters.On Monday Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netenyahu said he’s open to “tactical” fighting pauses but not to a ceasefire until the more than 200 Israeli hostages held by Hamas are released. Behind the scenes, intense negotiations are taking place to facilitate the release of these hostages as well as help civilians trapped inside Gaza and a central figure in these talks is Qatar.Kristian Coates Ulrichsen is the Fellow for the Middle East at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston Texas. He’s on the show to explain why this tiny Gulf nation is acting as mediator in the Israel-Hamas war.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

The war between Israel and Hamas is now in its sixth week. Cease fire now! Cease fire now! Cease fire now! International calls for a cease fire are getting louder. On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he's open to, quote, tactical fighting pauses, but not to a ceasefire. Well, there'll be no ceasefire, general ceasefire in Gaza without the release of our hostages. Israel is currently focused on Gaza City's al-Shifa hospital, which it says sits on top of an underground Hamas headquarters.

Hamas denies this. Inside the hospital, the situation is dire. Hamas says 650 patients are trapped on the grounds, along with 5 to 7,000 other civilians. 40 patients have died, including three premature babies. The hospital in Gaza. Have you expressed any specific concerns to Israel on that, sir? On Monday, U.S. President Joe Biden was asked about the situation. We're in contact. And with the Israelis, also, there is an effort to take this pause to deal with the release

of prisoners. And that's being negotiated as well with the Qataris engaged. And so I remain somewhat hopeful. It might be hard to hear, but in that clip, Biden mentions Qatar, which is part of ongoing behind-the-scenes negotiations between Hamas and Israel. The tiny Gulf nation is playing an outsized role in this war. So today, we're speaking with Christian Coates Ulrichsen. He's the fellow for the Middle East at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston, Texas. His research focuses

on Persian Gulf states and their changing position in the global order. He's also the author of multiple books, including Qatar and the Gulf Crisis. Christian will explain Qatar's powerful role in the Israel-Hamas war and whether they can help negotiate a resolution. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Christian, thank you so much for being here today. Yeah, thanks for having me. So Qatar is a small country in size, right? It's not much bigger than PEI. It's situated between Saudi Arabia and Iran in the Middle East, and that's a ways away from the Israel-Hamas war. And yet, Qatar is playing a really big role in the war., and that's a ways away from the Israel-Hamas war. And yet,

Qatar is playing a really big role in the war. So, Christian, can you describe their position? Yes, Qatar is not a frontline state. It never has been. It's never been in a state of war with Israel. It's not part of the current conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. However, the Qataris have long played a mediating role in regional disputes and conflicts across the Middle East. They have relationships with state and non-state parties that they try to leverage to serve as an intermediary between parties that cannot or will not engage directly. And in the current context, this involves a pragmatic working relationship with Israel, where Qatar has been providing humanitarian and financial support to Gaza since 2018,

and also a functional relationship with the political leadership of Hamas, who have been based in Doha since 2012. So we see Qatar involved in the mediation to at least try and secure the release of hostages precisely because they have those relationships on both sides, which means they can try to act as the man in the middle to try to at least exchange messages, serve as a back channel for communication and dialogue, and especially in this case to secure negotiation of hostage release. So how exactly are these negotiations working? Are they in a room talking to each other? How are these actually happening? Well, they're very, very, very discreet. And so they haven't been made public in terms of the actual manner in which they take place. But Bill Burns, the head of the CIA and the head of Mossad were in Qatar last week, for example. And so I imagine what is probably happening is that the US and Israeli side are meeting with the Qataris, and then the Qataris will have a separate meeting, most likely in a

completely separate location with Hamas officials in Doha, and exchange messages, pass communications over from one side to the other, and then trying to find where the potential points of overlap are, if there are areas of compromise. And do we know what issues are on the table here? I mean, the hostage situation is obviously the most pressing and urgent, and that is the one that the Qataris have been engaged on since pretty much day one. I suspect that a lot of the are taking place around the conditions under which there might be a release. And so that involves humanitarian pause.

How long? Under what conditions? What would Hamas be expected to deliver in response? How many hostages? Is it just a way of stringing this out for as long as they can? Or is there a way of linking the hostage release to trying to diffuse the wider conflict? The other issue, I think, is probably how many hostages are still alive after a month of bombardment of Gaza. And I think part of the issue there is Hamas needs to provide a full accounting of who they're holding and what condition they are. And so these might be all issues that are on the table in these meetings.

So this is interesting. Let's actually continue talking about Qatar's role as mediator and Qatar's relationship with these different sides here. So you talked a little bit about their relationship with Hamas, that there's leadership based in the capital, Doha. Why is Hamas' political leadership based in Qatar's capital, right, instead of somewhere in Gaza or somewhere else? Why there? The political wing of Hamas was initially based in Jordan in the 1990s.

In 1999, they were expelled from Jordan. They ended up in Syria. And in 2012, partly because Hamas did not unconditionally back the Assad regime as Assad tried to crush the uprising in Syria, they relocated again. And US officials at the time in 2012 felt that it was better to have Hamas in a state like Qatar, which is a US partner, where they could be reached, if necessary, indirectly to de-escalate. In the same way that around the same time, the US encouraged the Qataris to host a Taliban negotiation team as well. So again, it was felt it would be better to have Hamas in Qatar than, say, in Iran, where they wouldn't be able to reach them. So in 2014, there was a previous round of fighting in Gaza, and that Qatar played a key role in trying to bring that to an end. So U.S. officials trust the Qataris. Hamas political figures trust the Qataris. And so they're able to leverage those relationships to at least position themselves as a relatively independent sort of third party that they can try to work through.

And I think so far what we've seen since October the 7th is that within probably within the first day we saw both the US and Israel looking to the Qataris to try and figure out what has happened and how they could begin to at least have backtroubles going forward. And I just want to, I guess, clarify one part here, Christian. When we're talking about Hamas, we were speaking about the political wing that is in Qatar, in Doha, right? But there's also the militant wing. But these are somewhat separate then? Yes. I mean, there's a lot of reporting which suggests that the political wing of Hamas in Doha was not necessarily aware of what was being planned in Gaza, and that you may have had a much more hardline faction in Gaza, which obviously led the planning

of this attack on Israel, the massive group of more than 1,000 people. In the same way, for example, that we saw after 2021 in Afghanistan, the Taliban figures who were in Doha were not seen to be the ones who actually were able to wield power back in Afghanistan. Once the Taliban took power, they were outmaneuvered by much more hardline factions who had been at home the entire time. That's some interesting context for this as well. Let's expand this now. What about Qatar's relationship with Israel? How is it that Israel is trusting Qatar to be a mediator here when Hamas's political leaders are actually based in Qatar, in the capital?

Yes, so Israel has normalized relations with several Arab states, obviously Egypt in 1979, Jordan in 1994, and then the Abraham Accords in 2020 with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Qatar hasn't normalized with Israel. There's no formal diplomatic or political relationship. But since the 1990s, there have been kind of informal, working pragmatic relationships on specific issues as and when they need to work together.

Israel actually opened a trade office in Doha in the 1990s. It closed in the 2000s after the Palestinian Intifada. And since 2018, the Qataris have been providing humanitarian and financial support to Gaza, coordinated every step of the way with the Israeli authorities. And the Israelis have on numerous occasions actually requested that Qataris continue the support, partly, I think, because it was a way of trying to at least prevent the complete humanitarian collapse in Gaza. Can you help me understand this, Christian? Why would Israel want to go through Qatar to send aid to Gaza? Why not just do it directly? Why go through this third party? Well, I think the Israeli point of view was

that they had withdrawn from Gaza in 2005. And since 2007, with Hamas in control, they didn't necessarily want to provide that support themselves. But there was a recognition that some basic levels of humanitarian and financial support had to be given to prevent a complete implosion. And so eventually, in 2018, a decision was made, I think, that Qatar was the right interlocutor for that, in part because I suspect the relationship of trust had been established. And of course, Qatar had proven itself in previous rounds of Hamas-Israel tension as an effective intermediary that could actually deliver. And so I think that was probably the genesis of the expansion of that aid in 2018 into a more formalized

institutional arrangement. Okay, I do want to ask you about the US now, because we know the United States is very much involved in the geopolitics of this war. So what about Qatar's relationship with the U.S.? What is the state of that? And how does that relationship fit into what's going on now with negotiations? Well, Qatar has a very close relationship with the U.S. They host Al Udeid Air Base, which is the forward headquarters of CENCOM, the U.S. Central Command. It's been based in Doha, or just outside Doha since 2003. So this is a US military base in Qatar? The biggest US military base in the Middle East. So that relationship is very strong. It's a very strong energy component to the relationship. In 2022, Qatar was awarded major non-NATO ally status

by the Biden administration. And that came right after the Qataris were extremely supportive to the US during the withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was very chaotic, if you remember, and the Qataris were able to, again, leverage the relationships they had built with Taliban officials to get thousands of people out. So we saw a very close relationship emerge, and the Qataris proved in the Taliban example they could deliver. And so I suspect that's why we're seeing so much trust being placed in the Qataris now. So, yeah, so Qatar is an ally of the U.S. and then has also had past success in this manner.

So in this way, it sounds like the U.S. and then has also, you know, had past success in this manner. So in this way, it sounds like the U.S. is kind of speaking through Qatar in order to negotiate with Hamas in this current situation. And also, I think with Iran, too. Again, the U.S. and Iran don't have a diplomatic relationship, haven't had one since 1979. And so if you're the U.S. and you don't deal with certain parties or countries, it's very useful to be able to talk to someone who does. We'll be back in a minute. Okay, so Christian, we've established that Qatar is functioning as a mediator because of its relationship with Hamas and with the U.S. and Israel. But help me understand, why does Qatar want to be a mediator in the first place? Yeah, they want to be a mediator because they're a very small state in a volatile part of the world

where we've seen multiple interstate conflicts and wars since the 1980s. The Iran-Iraq War from 80 to 88, the Gulf War in 1991, US invasion of Iraq in 2003. And it has been felt that a small state can, to use the phrase, punch above its weight by offering services that overcome the constraints of being small. And one of those services is by being able to talk to all parties and to have those relationships that for whatever reason, parties in conflict with each other don't have. And so I think from a Qatari point of view, I mean, they share ownership with Iran of the biggest gas field in the world, which is the engine for Qatar's economic growth. They can't afford to have a conflict in the Gulf with Iran involving either Iran and the US or Iran and Israel would be absolutely devastating.

And so there's a very strong incentive to leverage what relationships they have to try to minimize the risk of conflict. I mean, it kind of makes me honestly think about Switzerland and Europe, right? The smaller state that usually takes a more neutral position. I don't know if that's comparable or not to Qatar and the Middle East. Yeah, sometimes they've been actually described as Switzerland in the Middle East. And so has Oman, actually, to some extent, Kuwait too. I mean, we've seen the three smaller states in the Gulf, three of these smaller states, all engaging in the same way to try to avoid being drawn into disputes. What's Qatar's history in mediating conflicts? I guess I'm specifically wondering how

successful have they been in the past? So the big breakthrough in a sense was in 2008. And in 2008, there was a two-year-long political standoff in Lebanon over the election of a new president. It looked as if Lebanon might be plunged back into civil war. And the Lebanese political leadership met in Qatar and Doha for several days, and they agreed on the Doha agreement to actually agree on a new president. And that was Qatar's kind of breakout moment. It showed they could deliver an agreement that obviously worked in that sense. And then the Qataris tried to mediate in Yemen in 2009. There was fighting between Houthi rebels and the Yemeni government. The Qataris were also engaged in mediating in Darfur and Sudan.

The Qatari mediation then took a bit of a knock during the Arab Spring because in 2011-2012, there was a perception across much of the region that Qatar was picking sides. And even if that was a bit unfair, it was certainly the case that the Qataris were more willing to accept the will of the people where they were voting in transition states. I guess the point of a mediator state is that you want to be seen as not taking a side, right? You want to be in the middle there. So you're saying in the situation of the Arab Spring, though, they were actually maybe not seen as neutral. I think they were perceived as backing

a lot of the popular movements against authoritarian leaderships, which creates a lot of backlash, especially among other states in the Gulf, like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, which then launched a lot of pressure on Qatar. But we had a change of leadership in 2013. And what has happened since 2013 is we've seen a much kind of reorientation to some extent. And the Qataris have also decided they have to work absolutely very closely with international partners. So they worked with the US every step of the way with the Taliban negotiations. They've worked with Israel every step of the way with the Hamas issue as well. And so to try to address the skepticism of 2011, 2012, which was why is Qatar doing this or doing that?

Are they doing their own thing? Are they sort of freelancing? That was the perception and that was the accusation made against Qatar by many of the regional critics. You're saying they really worked to kind of turn that around or to regain the trust that they had before. Absolutely. And by doing everything since in absolute close coordination with the relevant international

or regional party concerned, the US in the case of Taliban and Israel in the case of Hamas. Christian, I guess I'm wondering about end goals here when we're talking about the current conflict. We know Hamas says they want a ceasefire before they release any more hostages. Israel says they want hostages released before a ceasefire. But what about Qatar?

What does Qatar want in all of this? Well, I think Qatar wants to be part of a solution in terms of trying to mediate an end to the conflict and to what happens next. I think there's a feeling that a military solution alone cannot work. It will not be sustainable. If anything, it will make the problem a lot worse. And the next explosion could be even more horrific than the one we saw on October the 7th. The challenge perhaps may be that the Hamas is now seen by Israel, by the U.S., is completely beyond the pale. So the question is, what happens next? What happens to the Hamas leadership in Doha? I think it'd be a mistake to drive them out. I mean, if they went to somewhere

like Iran, it would lose a lot of potential, at least kind of ability to reach them, should that be necessary. So I suspect the end game is to try to bring this conflict to an end to ensure there's not just a focus on the military component, that you have to link it to some sort of political solution, partly because this has been an ongoing process since 2006, where effectively Gaza was just left alone to fester and to sort of the pressure to build up until it exploded. And I think there's a consensus that whatever happens next, there cannot be any going back to the status quo, which we saw before October the 7th. And so the Qataris, I think, will be working with their other partners in the Middle East to at least try to influence as best they can that sort of day after policy. Just before I let you go here, Christian, we don't exactly know how this is all going to

play out yet, but I'm curious to hear what you're looking for. What will you be watching for as these negotiations progress? Well, I think who will have to sort of make the concession first in terms of what happens first, is there a ceasefire or a release? Someone's going to have to give. And so I think looking at the conditions under which any hostage release may take place and how many, and obviously we still don't know how many are still alive. So I think looking at the pace of release of hostages and the conditions under which they happen, I think will be indicators of whether Qatar and other states in the Arab world can continue to engage productively. Christian, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.

Thanks for having me. That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening

and I'll talk to you tomorrow.