Anti-Qatar campaign scores point by ensuring shut down of Varsity
By James M Dorsey
With the Gaza ceasefire and prisoner exchange talks stalled, Israel and its hardline US supporters have stepped up long-standing efforts to discredit Qatar, the main mediator between Hamas and the Israeli government.
The anti-Qatar campaign accuses the Gulf state, of forging relations with problematic groups and supporting the likes of Hamas and the Taliban as part of its conflict mediation policy, even though those relationships were encouraged by the United States and, in the case of Hamas, Israel.
The stepped-up efforts coincide with Israel effectively walking away from Qatari, Egyptian, and US efforts to negotiate a pro-longed ceasefire in the four-month-old Gaza war and a prisoner exchange that would free the remaining 136 Hamas-held Israeli hostages and the bodies of captives killed during the war.
Hamas abducted some 250 people during its October 7 attack on Israel. Approximately 120 hostages were released in November during a one-week Qatar-mediated truce in exchange for 240 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
The anti-Qatar campaign scored a tangible success earlier this month with Texas A&M University's announcement that it was shutting down its two-decade-old Qatar campus. Handsomely funded by Qatar Foundation (QF), Texas A&M is one of eight foreign universities, including Georgetown, Northwestern, Well Cornell Medicine, and Carnegie Mellon, alongside Qatar's Hamid bin Khalifa University, with operations in the Gulf state's Education City.
In a statement, the foundation said Texas A&M's decision was “influenced by a disinformation campaign aimed at harming the interests of QF… It is deeply disappointing that a globally respected academic institution like Texas A&M University has fallen victim to such a campaign and allowed politics to infiltrate its decision-making processes.” Texas A&M said its decision was “due to heightened instability in the Middle East.”
The closure followed the publication of a report by the New York-based, pro-Israel Institute for the Study of Global Anti-semitism and Policy (ISGAP) alleging that Texas A&M had shared sensitive nuclear energy and weapons development research with the Qatari government. Texas A&M denied the ISGAP report, which said Qatar paid Texas A&M more than US$1 billion for the rights to all intellectual and material assets developed in more than 500 technology projects in sensitive fields such as nuclear science, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, robotics, biotechnology, and advanced weapons development.
Conveniently, Israel, as it demonises Qatar, buries its own engagement with Hamas as well as the fact that Egypt long saw the group as an asset in countering Islamist militants in the Sinai Peninsula. The Israeli campaign is not that far in time from the days that Netanyahu asked Qatar to fund the salaries of Gaza's Hamas administration and some reconstruction after five earlier wars.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), founded by Yigal Carmon, a former advisor to Israel's West Bank and Gaza occupation authority and Prime Ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin, has produced in recent months a series of reports designed to bolster Israel's campaign against Qatar.
In MEMRI's latest broadside, Carmon asserted, echoing Netanyahu, that the hostage negotiations were faltering “because Qatar is not pressuring Hamas. It sees itself as a mere go-between. Qatar isn't pressuring Hamas despite the fact that in reality, Qatar is the lifeline of Hamas – its hope, its future, its power to continue to fight and to hold the hostages.”
Ignoring that Hamas was founded in 1986 in Israeli-occupied and besieged Gaza at a time that Israel tacitly saw the group as an anti-dote to Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Mr. Carmon charged that “Qatar built Hamas from a small organization into a military and political power. It took pride in its training of ‘Hamas security officials.'… Without Qatar, Hamas is doomed.” To be fair, Carmon's tirade also took Mr. Netanyahu to task for allowing Qatari funds to flow to Hamas.
Mr. Netanyahu “violated Israeli and international anti-terrorism laws by allowing the money from Qatar, a state sponsor of terrorism, to reach Hamas, recognized as a terrorist organization across the West – thereby transforming this violation into a policy – until it exploded in his face,” Carmon said.
On Sunday, Netanyahu asserted that “the release of hostages can be achieved through strong military action and tough negotiations, very tough negotiations. That tough position has to involve the exertion of pressure. And the exertion of pressure is not merely on Hamas itself, but on those who can exert pressure on Hamas, beginning with Qatar.”
In response, Qatar foreign ministry spokesman Majed Al-Ansari called on the prime minister “to focus on the path of negotiations that serves the security of the region and end the ongoing tragedy of the war instead of issuing such statements whenever it suits his narrow political agenda.”
Netanyahu's hard line in the ceasefire negotiations and effort to discredit the mediator has as much to do with domestic Israeli politics as with not wanting to hand Hamas a victory when Israel has yet to show substantial progress in destroying the group not only militarily but also politically and organisationally.
Hamas' ability to maintain its position in the ceasefire and prisoner exchange negotiations highlights Israel's failure so far to wipe the group off the face of the earth.
US intelligence estimated earlier this month that Israel has killed or captured at most 30 per cent of Hamas' 30,000-strong fighting force. The Israeli military said in early January that it had killed or captured up to 9,000 Hamas fighters.
Adding fuel to the fire, Hamas has resurfaced in parts of Gaza from which Israeli forces have withdrawn in the past month in the belief that they had eliminated the group's presence in parts of the Strip. A man sits on the rubble as others wander among debris of buildings that were hit by Israeli airstrikes in the northern Gaza Strip.
In Gaza city, the Strip's largest urban area, Hamas has recently deployed uniformed and plainclothes police officers to prevent the looting of shops and houses abandoned by residents and restore law and order and paid salaries to some of its civil servants.
In doing so, Hamas, on the back of its governance infrastructure and charity network, positions itself as the only entity willing and able to administer Gaza and provide essential services in a wasteland in which Israel curtails the flow of desperately needed aid and seemingly systematically destroys Gaza's civilian infrastructure. (IPA Service)
By arrangement with the Arabian Post.
