Member Newsletter
I wanted to flag a couple issues in the background of the ongoing Israel-Hamas War.
The first is a potential deal to end the war proposed by Qatar. After I describe that potential deal, I’m going to come back to note that just today Qatar has disputed that it floated such an idea. But I’m not sure we can take that denial at face value. So let’s start by describing the proposal, as reported by numerous sources.
Here’s the proposal.
Israel would, in stages, end its campaign in Gaza and withdraw the IDF from the Gaza Strip. Hamas, in stages, would release all Israeli hostages. Critically, Israel would then allow the top Hamas leadership in Gaza safe passage to go into exile abroad.
Early in the war, I noted that the First Lebanon War (1982) ended after the PLO, including Yasser Arafat, evacuated from besieged Beirut in August and September of 1982. This Qatari proposal sounds something like that. Lurking behind such a proposal is something between a possibility and an assumption that Hamas’s political leadership in Qatar thinks future political control of Gaza may be a lost cause and may have additional interest in sidelining Yahya Sinwar, the dominant Hamas leader in Gaza.
Numerous reports held that Hamas had responded to this proposal by demanding a broad prisoner release by Israel and also insisting it would not agree to any deal that did not leave it in control of Gaza. Absent that, it’s not clear what there is to discuss since ending Hamas’s political rule in Gaza has been Israel’s central war aim from the beginning. More broadly it’s not clear what new there would be in such a deal. It’s been pretty clear that Israel could get its hostages back for some time if it called off its war, retreated entirely from the Gaza Strip and left Hamas in control of the territory.
Adding to the confusion, just today Qatar denied that its current proposal included exile for Hamas’s top leadership in Gaza. So did none of this really happen? Maybe? My own sense is that this was so widely reported from so many different directions that we shouldn’t take Qatar’s denial entirely at face value. Add to that, as I noted, why would they have floated the proposal at all? We should consider the possibility that a global agreement to end the conflict might be closer than many think.
Next, a closely related but distinct issue. Yesterday, Politico EU published an article on what it claims are rising Western suspicions that Qatar had some advance knowledge of Hamas’ massacres across southern Israel on October 7th. According to a top intelligence official of one major European power quoted by Politico, there’s “smoke” but no smoking gun.
On its face this might not sound that surprising. Qatar hosts Hamas’s top political leadership and it’s Hamas’s top funder. Why would we be surprised if they knew something in advance? But Qatar is also the host of a U.S. military base and two years ago President Biden took the extraordinary step of naming the country a major non-NATO ally of the U.S., a designation shared by only 18 countries in the world including Australia, Bahrain, Jordan, Japan, Israel and Egypt.
This gets to the heart of the oddity and centrality of Qatar’s position in the region. They manage to be somewhere between friends and enemies of almost everyone and thus a possible intermediary for almost everyone. Indeed, if it is true that Qatar had some advance knowledge — which we can’t assume — perpetuating this status could have been a reason for allowing the Hamas massacres to happen. A full normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia would have shifted the balance of power in the region in key ways, diminished the value of that intermediary role and left Qatar significantly more isolated.