The Road to Middle East Peace Runs Through Doha

While the Israel-Hamas War is raging, Western leaders have a unique opportunity to plan a wholesale reconfiguration of the chessboard of Middle Eastern politics. Because there is no purely military outcome which can provide security or prosperity for either Israelis or Palestinians, failure to seize the diplomatic opportunity presented by this crisis will make future wars increasingly likely.

Diplomats must respond to events on the battlefield, but they should also try to shape them. Israeli leaders have made it clear that they have no novel concept for the day after and are trying to use the war to destroy Hamas and weaken Iran’s regional proxies. Their articulated strategy is simply a more drastic form of “mowing the lawn” and will allow the same regional dynamics to resurface post-war, just as they have after previous rounds of Israel-Hamas fighting or the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war.

Hamas, Iran, and Russia do not plan to end the war by securing diplomatic objectives. Their goal is disorder. They intend to use the war to inflame regional and global tensions, so as to keep their adversaries divided. At the war’s end, the absence of a regional solution and a hardening of pre-existing fissures is a victory for Hamas, Iran, and Russia.

Western diplomats planning for the day after the conflict are thus confronted with a choice: push to use this war to merely weaken their enemies or seek to reshape the region’s existing power blocs?

The former would result in a hardening of the region’s existing three camps: pro-Iranian/pro-Russian (Hezbollah, Syria, Yemen’s Houthis), those willing to work with the Muslim Brotherhood (Qatar, Turkey, Western Libya), and those virulently opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood (United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Eastern Libya). The latter could achieve a conceptual reframing of the region into an axis of Orderers united in their willingness to collaborate to confront the Disorderers.

Western diplomats can attempt to remove regional drivers of conflict by pulling the existing grouping of Arab states willing to work with the Muslim Brotherhood (namely Qatar and Turkey) away from their occasional dalliances with both Iran and destabilizing Sunni militant movements like Hamas.

The lynchpin in this realignment must be Qatar since it occupies the position of pivotal swing state for the entire Middle Eastern system. Only Qatar can talk with Sunni extremists and the Ayatollahs, as well as the Saudis, Turks, Israel, and the United States. This is why all hostage release deals are mediated exclusively through Doha. If the Qataris can be encouraged to decisively embrace the forces of order, the region can exit the current conflict poised for stability, economic growth, and in a position to evict Iranian proxies from the region.

To do so, they must grasp that the road to regional peace runs through Doha. It is not only the place of residence of Hamas’s political wing, but Qatar acts as Hamas’s piggy bank and entrance point to the international financial system. As such, only Qatar can rein in Hamas, guarantee that a defeated Hamas does not rise again, and ensure that the Sunni Arab powers are united in confronting destabilizing Russian and Iranian proxies.

Hamas emerged during the first intifada to galvanize political Islam in the Palestinian territories to adopt a rejectionist “resistance” stance toward Israel and abandon the previous quietist stance which had characterized Muslim Brotherhood activity in Gaza in the 1970s and early 1980s. Now, thanks to Qatari control of its purse strings, the Muslim Brotherhood must be urged to return to a quietist direction throughout the region.

Only Qatar can talk with Sunni extremists and the Ayatollahs, as well as the Saudis, Turks, Israel, and the United States.
Until now, Emirati and Qatari funding of opposing political movements in all the post-Arab Spring states has been a primary driver of the regional mess the world now faces. But that can—and must—change.

Mature Anglo-American diplomacy should therefore focus on creating a Qatari, Emirati, Saudi, and Egyptian condominium to administer post-war Gaza’s foreign affairs, borders, health care, infrastructure, and education for a period of five to 10 years while rebuilding, de-Hamasification, and preparations for elections are undertaken. Lessons from post-conflict states that have held elections too early, for example post-Arab Spring Libya or Egypt, should serve as a warning against a rush to turn things over to the Palestinian Authority (or another successor government) or to bring about elections too soon.

Many on the Israeli and American right do not trust the Qataris and accuse them of wishing for Hamas to survive out of ideological affinity and a desire to be needed as a mediator. That is an outdated reading of Qatari intentions fueled by a right-wing obsession with punishing states that work with Islamist movements. In the early post-Arab Spring period, the Qataris unfortunately funded assorted armed Sunni militants in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Gaza. Some of their foreign policy choices during that period do not look so wise in hindsight. Now is the time for the West to allow the Qataris to turn the page.

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Fortunately, those Qatari choices to back Islamist militants and wage a proxy war with the UAE are mostly associated with the current Emir’s father and his advisors. Over the last few years as the new Emir has cemented his rule, he has progressively distanced himself from the confrontational choices of his father and doubled down on his role as the region’s top mediator with non-state actors. According to Courtney Freer, author of Rentier Islamism: The Influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gulf Monarchies, “Qatari leadership has repeatedly emphasized its desire to maintain ties with [non-state Islamist] groups not necessarily to support them but to leverage access as a means of facilitating mediation.”

According to Freer, Qatari diplomats “have emphasized that it is impossible for a state to have a foreign policy position toward non-state actors, since engagement with them is fundamentally different from engagement with nation-states.” Part of this desire to be the region’s mediating superpower is to showcase Qatar’s role as a global player, despite its small size.

The Qataris were instrumental in U.S. negotiations with the Taliban and with cementing the Ukraine-Russia grain deal. In this current situation, the Qataris as patrons of the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the region must be involved not only to give legitimacy to any post-war governance arrangements for Gaza, but to completely change the direction of the Brotherhood’s political involvement throughout the Middle East.

This is the perfect moment for the Biden and Sunak administrations to distance themselves from the divisive anti-Qatari and anti-Muslim Brotherhood agenda of the Trump and Johnson Administrations and to return to the pre-blockade reality where both countries worked with all their Gulf allies.

Since the rapprochement between Qatar and its neighbors in January 2021, there has been a willingness for the core Gulf countries to mend ties publicly. As Freer notes, “they do not need to have the same positions in all aspects of foreign policy, for instance when it comes to Syria’s re-entry into the Arab League, to find avenues for cooperation.” From the Qatari perspective, joint administration of Gaza with their Gulf Cooperation Council neighbors could be a capstone to the reconciliation process by creating a web of shared interests.

For years, the Qataris have seen which way the wind is blowing and have been searching for cover to switch sides.

A Qatari-led Pan-Arab arrangement for Gaza can only be achieved once the Qataris and Emiratis are on the same side regionally and working together to evict Iranian influence from Gaza and elsewhere in the Arab Middle East—such as Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon.

Once in place after the war and subsequent Israeli withdrawal, the Qatari-Saudi-Egyptian-Emirati “Quad” should be responsible for maintaining complete disarmament of Gaza and the monitoring of imports to make sure that dual use items are not able to enter the territory. Jordan should be involved in behind-the-scenes diplomacy, but not in the administration of Gaza, so as to differentiate arrangements in Gaza from those in the West Bank and custodianship over the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem.

Eventual Palestinian sovereignty over Gaza should be formally acknowledged in international law. To secure formal Palestinian buy-in, representatives of the Palestinian Authority and prominent non-Hamas figures in Gaza should be invited to Doha for an international conference announcing the idea. Messaging should make clear that this is not creating the legal framework of a three-state solution— although it does not preclude one. Interim post-war trusteeship for Gaza does not prejudice future developments in the West Bank, other than to affirm that eventual Palestinian sovereignty is acknowledged over all of Gaza and most of the West Bank.

For years, the Qataris have seen which way the wind is blowing and have been searching for cover to switch sides. In 2017, Qatar expelled some Hamas members under Western pressure.

In fact, in many instances the Qataris have shown a willingness to negotiate on this issue and to be constructively pushed even if some segments of its leadership may harbor more extremist views. Whatever their leadership’s private inclinations, Western diplomats need to create a legal framework that assures that, post-War, the Qataris are firmly in the camp of the Orderers.

Most Israelis do not want Israel to occupy Gaza indefinitely as it would burden the Israeli finance ministry, repeat the cycle of violence, foster global anti-Semitism, and further entrench the same regional dynamics that led to the war. An Arab-led administration of postwar Gaza would solve these problems by presenting the Israeli public with a unified U.S.-British-GCC solution where all major regional players accept Israel’s right to exist and have a shared interested in preventing future regional conflagrations. If Israeli leaders truly want to return the hostages, they should be made to accept the Arab Quad’s condominium over post-War Gaza.

Qatar’s traditional opponents in the GCC may be loath to play second fiddle to the Qataris or watch the Qataris be hailed as the saviors of Palestine. They must be incentivized with the carrot of blanket support against Iran and the stick of no future Anglo-American arms sales if they do not comply. From a Saudi perspective, the start of the Quad condominium can resuscitate and legitimize their peace talks with Israel. From the Emirati perspective, it presents an opportunity to be confirmed as leaders of an Abraham Accords 2.0 process in which the Palestinian question is being suitably addressed.

For nearly two decades Iran has played a disordering regional role in Gaza, southern Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Syria. Gulf states have long warned about the disordering consequences of the Iranian role throughout the region, but both the Obama-Biden negotiations with Iran and former President Donald Trump’s maximum pressure campaign have failed.

The United States and Britain need to publicly tell their Sunni Arab allies that they were right and we were wrong—that Washington and London value their input and will treat them as partners and not clients going forward. After issuing that praise, they should be confronted with a hard truth: Containment of Iran, their primary goal, and containment of Russia, the West’s primary goal, can only be achieved once the Qataris and Emiratis are on the same side regionally and working together to evict Iranian and Russian influence from Gaza and elsewhere.

It is time for Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Mohammed bin Salman, and Mohammed bin Zayed, to get themselves to Doha. A glorious byproduct of this inglorious Hamas-Israel war could be the permanent eviction of Russian and Iranian influence from the Arab World.