Qatar, double-dealers and carpetbaggers of the cause

Her country will not join the UAE and Bahrain in establishing diplomatic ties with Israel “unless the conflict with the Palestinians is resolved. ” This is what Qatar’s foreign minister, Lulua Al Khater, recently said, reminding me how much Qatari propaganda is just song and dance. It reminded me that many are double-dealing and carpetbagging over the Palestinian people’s cause.

Most surprisingly, Ms. Lulua rambled on with the double-dealing discourse. “We don’t think that normalization was the core of this conflict and hence it can’t be the answer.” “The core of this conflict is about the drastic conditions that the Palestinians are living under” as “people without a country, living under occupation.”

This tongue-in-cheek narrative adds up to a huge mass of media and political double-dealing that surrounds the UAE and Bahrain’s moves to enter into diplomatic ties with Israel.

The minister who entered the Qatari political scene a few years ago struggles to showcase her country’s position. However, her fresh experience, age or knowledge does not help her much, precisely because she has invested herself in something pretty well-understood in our Arab region.

Since 1996, when the commercial office was opened, your country has maintained official ties, although it no longer has diplomatic ties, with Israel.

Your channel, brandishing the banner of pan-Arabism, has been the window of normalization and media coverage of Israel among the Arab people for many years. Qatar’s media statecraft has even turned Israeli army spokesman Avichai Adarei into a primetime show star.

I won’t go into details of the Qatari-Israeli ties, including those that some Qatari officials and leaders have up until now maintained on the shores of Haifa. Information is documented and published online. There is no need to address it here because, as they say, “a straw will show which way the wind blows.”

The Qatari Deputy Prime Minister should just read “Qatar - Israel - A file of secret ties” by Shmuel Revel. Sammy Revel was minister delegate at the Israeli Embassy in Paris, former head of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ director general’s office and head of the interests office between the two countries in Doha from 1996 to 1999. The book details the “services” he received from the Qatari government to facilitate his duties. It also describes just as precisely the role Israel played in shaping Qatar’s regional role during that time.

What I find most relevant, rather than refreshing Ms. Lulua’s memory of her country’s official ties with Israel since 1996 (regardless of the little game of closing the Israeli trade office in Doha), is that she has been too committed to the role of naming and shaming the UAE and Bahrain’s sovereign decisions.

She bluntly forgot that Qatar cannot deny its ties with Israel or mudsling other countries for that matter. It is as if the minister had all of a sudden remembered about the stateless Palestinian refugees living under occupation. As if this situation did not exist when her country’s relations with Israel went through all the successive stages that everyone has been familiar with since the early 1990s.

These wild double-dealings simply echoed the positions of the Iranian-Turkish axis of double-dealers flanked by leaders of Palestinian militias and organizations, some of whom frequented Israeli officials more than their own families.

The double-dealings are motivated by carpetbagging and emotional blackmail on those they take for naïve among the fellow Palestinian people. What they don’t know is that these ordinary people know all the ins and outs of the story; they know very well who advocates for them and who play politics out of their pain and fight not for their rights but to perpetuate their ongoing situation unresolved.

Turkey also practices double-dealing. Its ties of strategic alliance with Israel stand today as they did in the 1990s. Only, they have gone from overt to covert to fit in with the double-dealing of the sultan’s regime.

Admittedly, the alliance is not active, but Sultan Erdogan has never gone so far as to declare once and for all that his country has broken with Israel. Only $18 million in 1987, the volume of trade between Israel and Turkey has soared to $6.6 billion in 2019.

Let’s not talk about the military deals, or the head of the Turkish intelligence services Hakar Vidan, and his regular meetings with Yossi Cohen, the head of Israel’s Mossad.

There is no shortage of examples of double-dealings. But I just wanted to point out that the Qatari position has taken double-dealing too far.

Finally, good old tactics have failed to give it any credibility, to the point of making statements that sound more like tasteless jokes.