How Hamas could be the engine for Qatar-Israel normalization

• Date: 29 December 2020
• Published date: 29 December 2020
• Author: YONAH JEREMY BOB
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Pressed that in November, Qatar rejected any imminent normalization with Israel, sources told the Post confidently that this would likely change during the incoming Biden administration's term.

Further, they said that close coordination between Israel and Qatar to facilitate sufficient funding for Hamas to keep Gaza's weak economy from collapsing will likely be the key to moving Doha to a normalization deal.

Ironically, even as Hamas is committed to Israel's destruction and periodically fires rockets at Israeli towns and cities, the strange dynamics with Gaza's rulers could help bring a legitimacy coup for Israel with the state that runs the influential Al Jazeera network.

Qatar has long been a focal point for many parties in the Middle East and Doha has been in a diplomatic and economic war with Saudi Arabia and other moderate Sunni Gulf countries since June 2017.

In mid-December, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas met with Qatari Emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, to try to convince him to host a peace conference in 2021.

The idea would be to move the conversation back from the Trump peace plan to the previous conventional Palestinian-Western plans for peace.

Surrounding all these contacts with Qatar is the fact that the US maintains close relations, including its key military base in the Middle East, in Qatar.

The combination of a US connection along with Qatar's ability to keep Hamas from starting a broad war, as occurred three times between 2009-2014, was part of what made Israel, through the Mossad, ready to deal with Doha on Gaza issues.

This was in spite of Jerusalem's unhappiness with many of the more Islamist causes and groups which Qatar supports, including that it has a strong relationship with Iran.

With Israel's approval, and often with Mossad Director Yossi Cohen's personal involvement, Qatar has periodically provided millions of dollars in cash to Hamas to keep its economic situation stable so that it will not want war.

When Hamas grew anxious that the payments would end in August, Cohen reportedly even took an especially active role to convince Doha to continue them, despite economic issues in Qatar related to the pandemic.

When attacked by some on the Right that the Mossad and Israel are serving as a middle-man to fund Hamas, Cohen has pushed back hard saying that the funds are humanitarian and that complex...