The Social World

Tag: Middle East

  • What Israel’s Qatar strike reveals

    What Israel’s Qatar strike reveals

    “We are ready to accept a deal (with Hamas) that would end this war, based on the cabinet decision,” Israeli foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar said this morning. Yet whatever diplomatic momentum existed evaporated into thin air hours later. In an unprecedented Israeli operation in Qatar, Israel targeted the very Hamas officials they were supposed to be negotiating with. In the blink of an eye, smoke was rising from a building in the Qatari capital, Doha. Hamas’s chief negotiator, Khalil al-Hayya, was targeted in the attack. Israel said the raid was in response to this week’s Jerusalem bus attack and the atrocities of October 7.

    The Qataris are livid; Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu not only made a mockery of the diplomatic process but ordered what could arguably be called a hostile act against a country in the Middle East whose diplomatic services are in high demand.

    “While the State of Qatar strongly condemns this assault, it confirms that it will not tolerate this reckless Israeli behavior and the ongoing disruption of regional security, nor any act that targets its security and sovereignty,” Qatari government spokesman Majed al-Ansari wrote on X.

    Operations like this aren’t new for Israel, of course. The Israelis are known to have some of the best intelligence assets available; the Mossad is one of the most sophisticated, capable and impressive intelligence services in the world. The list of successful tactical strikes like the one that took place in Qatar today is long, from the years-long campaign against the Black September terrorist group, the 2008 assassination of Hezbollah military official Imad Mughniyeh in Syria to the 2010 killing of Mahmoud al-Mabbouh in Dubai. The message is as clear as day: if Israel wants you dead, you will eventually be dead.

    The difference between those cases and today, however, is that Israel wasn’t technically engaged in negotiations with those groups at the time.

    The latest draft ceasefire to end the war in Gaza, put together in part by Steve Witkoff, US President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, was tabled days just a few days ago. The proposal would have compelled Hamas to release all of the remaining 50 or so hostages on the first day of a 60-day truce, mandated a gradual Israeli troop withdrawal from Gaza and establish a process whereby negotiations would continue until the two sides finally reached a permanent ceasefire. But that deal now lies in tatters, if it was a serious proposal to begin with.

    If Israel’s latest hit tells us anything, it’s that Netanyahu and his government aren’t interested in a negotiated resolution to the war in Gaza. This relatively mundane observation won’t come as a surprise to anybody who has been paying attention to the conflict for the last two years, but it’s worth pointing out nonetheless. Indeed, despite the Trump administration’s sporadic attempts to mediate between Israel and Hamas – and Trump’s own boasts about solving a bitter conflict his dim-witted predecessor couldn’t – the Trump White House hasn’t been any more successful in its diplomatic endeavors than the Biden White House was. Palestinian civilians are still dying. Israeli hostages, in dreadful conditions, are cowering in Hamas’s tunnel network. A humanitarian disaster is getting worse by the day. And Israel, its international reputation at its lowest in history, is drilling further down.

    Of course, a big part of this can be chalked up to the stubbornness of the combatants and their propensity to treat diplomacy as gamesmanship. Getting the two sides to agree on anything is more difficult than herding cats. The positions of Israel and Hamas remain poles apart. Whenever one side appears open to the certain peace framework, the other throws wrenches into the works. Following the October 7 attack, Israel remains committed to defeating Hamas as an institutional, political and military force, essentially wiping out the movement in totality. Yet Hamas isn’t going to sign its own death warrant, and Netanyahu knows this perfectly well. Describing this entire process as trying to jam a square peg into a round hole would be an understatement.


    The Americans, though, deserve a portion of the blame as well. Trump vacillates between wanting peace in Gaza and then enabling Israel’s military strategy, with the end result being incoherence. At times, Trump rightly wags his finger at Netanyahu and contradicts the Israeli premier in public, particularly on the subject of what is happening in Gaza. But the next day, he basically writes off Gaza as Israel’s problem and suggests that whatever the Israelis decide to do, he will unabashedly support it.

    To the extent the Trump administration has a Gaza policy, it’s akin to throwing various peace proposals into the ether – all of which eventually die on the vine – that are designed more to convince Washington’s Arab partners that the United States is doing something than to actually end a war in which tens of thousands of people have been killed.

    One thing is for sure: with this latest strike on Hamas in Qatar, Netanyahu has dealt a serious blow to a diplomatic process that was already on life support. And this was likely the goal all along.

  • Israel, you’ve gone too far

    Israel, you’ve gone too far

    If any other country in the Middle East had behaved as monstrously as Israel has in recent weeks, the jets would be lined up on our runways ready to do a bit of performative bombing. Never mind BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) and diplomatic pressure. I mention this because those of us who support Israel, and have done so largely uncritically since October 7 2023, need the scales to fall from our eyes a little – for the good of Israel, as well as the good of those starving Palestinians.

    I have been to Israel many times, as a journalist, as a holiday-maker, as a friend. I accept without demurral the argument that it is the region’s only democracy – and a liberal democracy at that – surrounded on all sides by authoritarian failed states which wish to see it wiped from the face of the Earth. I subscribe to the notion, too, that if Palestine got what Palestine wants – from the river to the sea and all that vainglorious spite – then they would turn one of the most remarkable countries in the world into a variant of Somalia within about six months (if that), no matter how much money its gullible white liberal well-wishers poured into the place. I have an absolute lack of respect for the impoverished Arab countries that are governed, in the main, by bloodthirsty and intellectually challenged religious maniacs, just as I have an absolute lack of respect for the rich Arab countries that were lucky enough to find a reservoir of oil in their sandpits and have created odious totalitarian slave states as a consequence.

    This may be unfair, but I have the distinct feeling that the Arab culture, when allied to Islam, makes for a uniquely toxic mindset; one fueled by absolutism, hatred and a disrespect for human life. I despise the feral savages of Hamas and was wholly in support of Israel’s incursion into Gaza, even if, at the time, I thought it might be more useful to begin by lobbing a few missiles at Tehran. Why not target the organ grinder rather than its imbecilic monkeys? Equally, I have a fierce loathing of the Keffiyeh Klan, the deluded legions of affluent western liberals who have embraced anti-Semitism with gusto and when asked to identify the sins of the world have only one answer.

    In short, I am instinctively, politically, morally and pragmatically on the side of Israel. I do not wish our country to recognize Palestine as a sovereign state (and my Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s decision to do so is a crass genuflection to his idiot backbenchers. Just what is it you are recognizing, you abject little man?). Nor do I think, pace Starmer, that Palestinians have “an inalienable right” to independent statehood. Just to press the point home, I believe that from the Maghreb to the Levant and then eastwards, over those vast dunes, into what was once much better off when it was called Persia, corrupt and vindictive regimes govern a corrupt and vindictive culture, one that is responsible for much of the misery in the world. Israel, then, is an oasis – which is why we cannot afford to allow it to pollute its own waters. And that seems very much like what it is doing right now.

    If you are already howling that I have swallowed Hamas propaganda, and that either it is Hamas who is stopping the aid getting through or that the far-from-starving Palestinians are tucking into three square meals per day, eggs Benedict, shrimp étouffée, bananas Foster and so on, then you are laboring under a delusion. If virtually every non-aligned observer in the world, including the President of the USA, believes that the people of Gaza are starving to death and Israel is primarily responsible, then that’s good enough for me, frankly.

    Of course Hamas has looted aid convoys and of course it lies to the press and the press is often far too quick to report what it says as being the truth. But that does not alter the fact that people – largely blameless people – are dying and that Israel is in large part to blame. Of course this conflict has, in the West, become hideously polarized and so it is all too easy simply to continue repeating the mantra that everybody is against Israel and one should believe only what one hears from the mouth of Benjamin Netanyahu and the IDF press office. (Even in that case, Netanyahu accepts that there are several areas where assistance has not made it through.) But if you sign up to that credo, you are morally lost. We have to form opinions based upon the evidence that is put before us, not have them devolve from partisan loyalties, no matter how well-founded those loyalties might be.

    It has to be said that the United Nations should be held primarily responsible for the partisan nature of the debate. Supposedly neutral, it has vilified Israel at every turn, just as in the past 20 years it has entertained resolution after resolution condemning Israel while ignoring every other transgression which occurs anywhere else on Earth. It came as no surprise to discover that Hamas terrorists were actively involved in UN programs. As soon as that was revealed, the awful secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, should have resigned. Meanwhile, we should take our leave of an organization which cleaves to the palpably stupid view that the wrongs of the world are the consequence of colonialism, except when those wrongs are committed by Israel. It is very far from being a force for good. Instead, it has become a force for disseminating demonstrably absurd post-Marxist delusions.

    I do not have a solution to the crisis. Frankly, Donald Trump’s idea of turning the Gaza Strip into a kind of Las Vegas, except with falafel in place of T-bone steak, has much to commend it, but that simulacrum of Sodom should not be built over the bodies of dead children. We support Israel because of its erudition and its strength but most of all because it has decency. Had decency. Please let it get that decency back.