Ilan Preskovsky: Understanding Qatar, the pimple with a loud global voice

Key topics:Qatar’s outsized global influence despite its small size and populationContradictory role in Gaza: Hamas ties, mediation, and Israel-US relationsSoft power through wealth, lobbying, media, and Western institutions.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Ilan Preskovsky.There is a tiny country in the Middle East with an influence on world affairs that far outstrips all but a tiny handful of the world’s main super powers. No, not that one. That country, which is the focus of most of the world’s scrutiny is but a bit player in comparison to this even smaller, even more misunderstood nation with a name that English speakers have trouble pronouncing correctly. I’m talking, of course, about Qatar: the third smallest country in the Middle East, but one boasting the fourth highest GDP per capita in the world.Nestled between the Middle Eastern juggernauts of Iran and Saudi Arabia, Qatar easily rivals both as a mover and shaker in world affairs. With a population of about 3 million, of which only 12% are Qatari citizens - the rest being migrant workers and expatriates - it is in many respects like most Middle Eastern countries: autocratic (despite having a constitution and nominal elections), run mostly according to Islamic Sharia law (despite only 65% of the population being Muslim), and with a long history of human rights abuses, especially against women, the LGBTQ and migrant workers (despite being a major player at the UN, including its human rights council). Unlike most other Middle Eastern countries, though, it sits on top of the world’s third largest oil and natural gas reserve, making it one of the richest nations on Earth. Not only has this made its royal family obscenely wealthy and the country itself one of the more advanced and developed in the region, it has ensured Qatar a prominent seat at the table on the international stage, especially as a prime negotiator in conflicts across the region and beyond. This is in no small part thanks to the fact that it has diplomatic ties with, for all intents and purposes, everyone: from developing African nations to despotic Islamist regimes to the very heart of the liberal-democratic order in Europe and North America. Qatar has enough worrying ties to Islamist terror that several “moderating” Arab countries cut ties with Qatar because of it over a decade ago, with its state-sponsored news network, Al Jazeera, banned in these and other Arab countries and even by the Palestinian Authority. Qatar is also one of the key financial sponsors of Hamas, hosting its political leaders for years – though both with the permission of the United States and Israel (more on that in a bit). At the same time, Qatar is also one of the United States’ most vital allies in the region – economically, inevitably, but also militarily, as it is host to the largest US military base in the region. President Donald Trump’s dealings with Qatar are especially notable. Beyond private dealings with the Qatari regime, Trump has increased America’s already substantial financial ties to Qatar. This includes, most infamously, the Qatari royal family’s donation of a luxury aeroplane worth some 400 million dollars to serve as Air Force One and then as part of his “presidential library” when he leaves office. Shameless corruption? Undoubtedly. But to his credit, it has also allowed Trump to exert an influence on Middle Eastern affairs that few of his predecessors can easily match.Qatar is, in short, one of the most important countries in the world, but its influence is both frequently underestimated and, frankly, so full of contradictions that it’s all but impossible to fully understand..The Gaza War: A Case Study .There is perhaps no greater example of both Qatar’s out-sized influence and complexity, though, than its role in the Israel-Hamas war – and indeed, the years preceding it.Unlike the outright antagonism of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Qatar’s relationship with Israel has long been a mess of broken and unbroken trade agreements, official and unofficial diplomatic ties, antagonism and cautious alliances. Qatar’s strong ties with Hamas, especially since the terror group took control of Gaza after Israel’s withdrawal in 2005, have been no less complicated. These connections caused increased tensions between the two countries, but at the same time, the Netanyahu government backed Qatar’s continuous funding of Gaza through payments made to Hamas and agreed with the US’ suggestion of having Qatar host Hamas’ political leadership to make it easier to communicate with them. This obviously all imploded on 7 October 2023 with Hamas’ invasion of Southern Israel. Those funds that Qatar sent into Gaza were earmarked as being for “humanitarian” assistance, but October 7th and the ensuing war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza made it perfectly clear that like all aid to the enclave, Qatar had instead funded and realised Hamas’ goal of not just invading Israel and massacring, raping, torturing and kidnapping its citizens, but of turning the entirety of Gaza into what is effectively the world’s largest terror base. While Netanyahu has spent the past months doing everything he possibly can to avoid taking any responsibility for what is, at the very least, a cataclysmic failure of judgement, Qatar has repositioned itself not as a country that bears massive responsibility for October 7th and everything that followed – and there is some evidence to suggest that they did so knowingly - but as a key negotiator between Israel and Hamas throughout the war, and a critical guarantor of Trump’s ceasefire-cum-peace-plan. Indeed, it was only once Trump got the Qataris to put pressure on Hamas that the terror group accepted the ceasefire – at least for its initial phase. Things became even more complicated, however, when the news broke at the start of 2025 that parts of Netanyahu’s government, including two aides close to the Prime Minister, had accepted bribes from Qatar to a) improve Qatar’s image in Israel and b) to ensure that Qatar, rather than Egypt, would be the intermediaries through which all negotiations between Israel and Hamas would proceed. This scandal, dubbed, rather unimaginatively, “Qatargate” continues to plague the Netanyahu government, provoking even further outrage against the Prime Minister in the lead up to Israel’s upcoming elections in 2026.And now, with the fragile ceasefire at a stalemate with Hamas refusing to disarm, it will be Qatar as much as nearly anyone, who will determine whether this pause in hostilities will lead to further stages of the peace plan – which includes the rebuilding of Gaza and the installation of a hopefully temporary international peace keeping force and interim government - or to the resumption of war..“Soft” Influence with Massive Ramifications.Qatar’s influence on the Middle East is clearly profound, deep and more than a little contradictory, but its “soft influence” on the West, and particularly the US, in academic, cultural, political, and social spheres is arguably even more profound, and even more covert.Qatar spends tens of millions of dollars in directly lobbying congress in the United States, but this is but a drop in the ocean to what it spends on key academic and cultural institutions across the West. Just in terms of “donations” to American universities, Qatar has given something like $4.7 billion over the past couple of decades to the top schools in the country. The Qatari government obviously pleads innocence in any wrong doing and insists that all these “foreign investments” are meant for the noblest of purposes – along with some much-need PR for Qatar, of course – but it’s hard to take the word of a country whose other major “PR arm” is Al-Jazeera.Al-Jazeera is considered by nearly everyone outside of the Middle East as a solid, mainstream media company that may have its issues but is really no more biased than, say CNN or Fox News. And, indeed, unlike its Arabic counterpart, which is effectively a propaganda tool for the Qatari government and is noted for its glorification of Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and for virulent anti-Israel and anti-Western content, the English-language version of Al Jazeera is relatively unbiased in its general reporting and is hailed for its extensive reportage on the “Global South” (formerly known as “the Third World”), but the minute it starts talking about, say, Islam or India or heaven help us, Israel, it quickly becomes apparent that it’s every bit as much a state-owned enterprise as its extremist Arabic counterpart.And for all that Qatar has ties with the West and for all that it likes to pretend that it’s a neutral party in the Israel-Hamas conflict, Al Jazeera, if you dig just a little deeper (or hell, even just scroll through its “controversies” page on Wikipedia), shows exactly where Qatar’s truest allegiances lie. And it’s certainly not for nothing that when you search for a story on Israel on Google, it is so often Al Jazeera that appears in the top 3 or so results, rather than, say, Times of Israel or even Ha’Aretz. But perhaps the greatest trick on the part of Qatar’s “soft influence” is how it has made the world erroneously think that it is Israel that exerts the sort of influence that Qatar actually does. AIPAC deals in chump change in comparison to Qatar (and many other lobbying groups) and Israel’s so-called “Hasbarah” is but a tiny – and woefully, pathetically inept - whisper lost in a storm of anti-Israel and anti-Western propaganda propagated through Qatar’s “soft influence” on the media and academia. None of this changes, of course, that Qatar is in no way a simple country to pigeonhole and it can’t be written off as fundamentally evil in the way, say, Putin’s Russia or the Islamic Republic’s Iran can be. For both good and ill, it is a massively important regional and international player with more facets than you can count. It’s just worth remembering that like its famous news network, you don’t have to scratch too far below its shiny surface to find some serious rot. It’s hardly the only country of which this is true, of course, but few are as good at playing the game as Qatar so obviously is.

Ilan Preskovsky: Understanding Qatar, the pimple with a loud global voice

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