The Qatar Problem
1st November 2025
Qatar has weaponised “mediation”: it has bankrolled Islamist power, posed as the indispensable broker, and sat on the leverage it had over Hamas from the start. For nearly two years, it has blamed Israel instead. Only when pressure escalated into strikes on Qatari soil—and the US sweetened the deal with guarantees and alternative investments—did Doha finally shift.
A week after the massacre of 7 October 2023, I sat with a cohort of young Jewish professionals in Washington, DC, under the auspices of the Israel Policy Forum. The air was thick with grief and confusion, and no one quite knew how to name what had happened yet. “This is a moment for humility,” said Aaron David Miller. At which point, I asked the same question I asked in every room I entered: “What are we doing about Qatar?”
The question was met with blank stares and raised eyebrows. One congressional staffer looked at me sideways, as if I was pushing a conspiracy theory. Only Hussein Ibish, senior scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute, seemed to understand. He nodded and explained: Qatar might hold the keys to resolution, but it has compromised the United States, because it built the largest US military base in the Middle East and handed the Pentagon the keys for free.