In 2022, the men’s football World Cup was held, somewhat controversially, in the Gulf state of Qatar. It’s a tiny country, rich from fossil-fuel exports and ruled by a feudal monarchy with a terrible human-rights record. Add in the blazing heat and lack of historic ties to the sport, and you could only conclude that for Fifa to send one of the biggest sporting events on Earth to the place was intended to make a clear statement. That statement was that Qatar is an essential part of the international economy, and its wealth and prestige mean that it gets to participate in world affairs, no matter what people think about it. It was a full member of the Western-dominated political order, no matter what criticisms anyone might have. It is breathtaking to think that not even three years later, that club membership has completely failed to protect Qatar from aggression by Israel.
At around lunchtime on Tuesday 9 September, huge explosions went off in Qatar’s primary city of Doha, causing buildings to shake and people to panic. Streets that were so recently bustling with excitement about the World Cup are now reduced to wartime chaos. Almost immediately, Israel confirmed that it had attacked the city with airstrikes, in a supposed bid to wipe out the negotiating team of the Palestinian insurgent organisation Hamas, who have had a diplomatic office in the city for thirteen years. It is currently not clear that they managed to do this, despite the destruction of a building and the deaths of at least six people.
These attacks, and the responses to them, show that the world has changed a lot in a very short time. In fact, it’s changed since the start of this summer. When Israel attacked Iran just months ago, it was still professing to be fighting enemies of ‘the West’ on its allies’ behalf. Now, the government of Benyamin Netanyahu just glibly states that it spotted an ‘operational opportunity’ to kill senior (albeit civilian) Hamas members. Notably, the Israelis aren’t bothering to pretend to believe that their actions are legal under international law. After a solid year and a half of denouncing the institutions that are supposed to administer international law, it appears that the line is that we shouldn’t worry about it anymore.
Although Israel states that it acted alone, the Trump administration in the USA has been quick to confirm that it had been informed that Israel was going to carry out this bombing and had given it the go-ahead. Trump’s people have also not bothered to offer any justification for it, other than that they will endorse pretty much any attack Israel can claim to be against Hamas, and offer no reassurances beyond ‘it won’t happen again’. I’m sure that’s a great comfort to the three million residents of Qatar.
The US aside, Western governments have been significantly less ready to apologise for Israel than they have over almost anything it has ever previously done. The now-standard condemnations from the United Nations have been matched in rhetoric by French president Emmanuel Macron, who has described the strikes as “unacceptable regardless of motive”, and even our own highly pro-Israel prime minister Starmer has said that they “violate Qatar’s sovereignty”.
The unusually strong words, by their standards, from these men reflect the massive difference between the status of Qatar and that of states they can afford not to care about like Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran. Qatar is strongly integrated into global capitalism as an exporter of natural gas and has deep ties to imperialism going back to its days as a princely ally with Britain’s Indian Empire. Even after it became independent and resource rich, the Qatari monarchs continued to collaborate extensively with Western states, especially Britain.
The UK and Qatar have been formal military allies for decades. Qatar routinely spends millions of dollars on British weapons, and as recently as last December, the two governments agreed to renew and deepen their military cooperation. It is a bit absurd, therefore, that the government in London now watches as Israeli aircraft, for which it supplied parts, bombs their supposed good ally.
It needs to be said that the reason that Hamas is even in Doha is precisely because it is Western ally: Qatar has been acting as a mediator between the West and its enemies in the Muslim world. Hamas’ civilian leadership has been operating in exile from Syria for a time but were forced to leave due to that country’s civil war. Qatar agreed to host them on the understanding that this was helping to keep diplomatic channels open despite the ongoing conflict with Israel in Gaza. The Gulf state had also played a similar role in maintaining a diplomatic outpost of the Afghan Taliban during the twenty-year occupation of that country by America.
The Israeli assault on Doha is therefore not just an illegal, unprovoked attack, but also a betrayal of basic diplomatic trust and a severing of supposedly vital routes for them to negotiate any sort of peace in the Palestinian territories. It makes a complete nonsense of continued claims by Netanyahu and Israel apologists that the country is simply fighting a war to release Israeli hostages captured during Hamas’ 7 October offensive two years ago, and this is not lost on the friends and family of those hostages inside the country. The Hostages and Missing Families forum issued a statement that said:
“The families of the hostages are following the developments in Doha with deep concern and heavy anxiety. A grave fear now hangs over the price that the hostages may pay … The chance of bringing them back now faces greater uncertainty than ever before …”
It’s not just Israel which is responsible for this, of course, since the USA has admitted they allowed them to do it. Qatar has been cooperating with America just as much as with European powers and hosts the largest American airbase in the entire Middle East. They have now been rewarded for their cooperation with American wars in Iraq, Syria and Yemen by being attacked themselves by America’s closest ally. This cannot but be causing them seriously to reconsider their foreign policy and their role in the world.
The bombing of Doha is an atrocity amongst very many in Israel’s ever-expanding war. It comes mere weeks after a huge assault on the government of Yemen, and as its occupying force in Gaza has announced another brutal evacuation of Gaza city. It’s become really difficult to remember that two years ago, propaganda still insisted that Israel was fundamentally peace-loving, that its army was ‘the most moral in the world’ and that its actions were simply the normal and lawful defensive operations of a liberal-democratic state.
Still, attacking Qatar does represent another distinctive red line that Israel, and by extension its imperial sponsor, the USA, has now crossed. Direct violence used to be limited to countries whose governments were either unfriendly to (or unrecognised by) the USA and who were marginal to the global capitalist economy. There was an accepted doctrine since the end of World War Two that being broadly in line with US foreign policy meant that you were safe from American military power. For a state like Qatar, it also meant you got a free hand on domestic policy that was very far removed from supposed Western values on issues like democracy, women’s rights and workers’ rights. The new Trump-Netanyahu doctrine is essentially one of no guarantees: they aren’t going to start trying to blow you up, until they are.
We in the anti-war movement would always have been opposed to bombing Doha for the same reason we oppose bombing elsewhere: it’s a tool of imperialist oppression, not of liberation. What we need to take from this situation, however, is that the system we’re fighting against is not in good shape. That America’s increasingly erratic foreign policy flails about while it does whatever it can to protect Israel’s ability to inflict colonial violence and genocide is both a symptom and further cause of its imperial domination becoming more and more rickety and unstable. We should not underestimate the massive strain these events have put on loyalty to the US in key institutions such as the European Union and Nato, to say nothing of the massive disgust that ordinary people around the world will have for the action. Cracks are appearing that a mass movement can prize open.
Source: Counterfire