Doha strike shows that no peace can be achieved by recognising Israel
Doha strike shows that no peace can be achieved by recognising Israel
Every time Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tries to kill Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, it ends in humiliation for Israel.
The first time was back in 1997. Mossad agents acting on orders from the Israeli prime minister entered Jordan, posing as Canadian tourists. Two of them waited at the entrance to Meshaal’s office in Amman, and when their target walked in, one held a device to his left ear that transmitted a fast-acting poison.
Meshaal’s bodyguards chased the two agents down, and others in the team fled to the newly installed Israeli embassy for refuge. At first, it was thought that the attack had failed. Meshaal described the attack as a “loud noise in my ear” and “an electric shock”. But as the poison began to take effect, his condition deteriorated.
Meshaal was a Jordanian citizen at the time, and King Hussein was angry. He demanded that Israel turn over the antidote, and threatened both to put the Mossad agents on trial and pull out of the historic peace agreement he had signed three years earlier in Wadi Araba, recognising Israel.
Former US President Bill Clinton forced Netanyahu to comply. Humiliatingly, Danny Yatom, then the head of Mossad, flew to Amman with the antidote. Meshaal, who was by then in a coma, survived.
Not only that, but Hussein had only released the two Mossad agents that Hamas bodyguards had caught. Six other members of the team were holed up in the Israeli embassy, and the king would only let them go if Israel released from prison Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, along with a large number of other Palestinian prisoners.
The whole affair proved a big blow to Israel. The sheikh began a victory tour of the region. Meshaal’s career in Hamas was launched. He had been relatively junior in the organisation before the attack, and Hamas itself gained in prestige as a movement that could stand up to a bully.
Whether the same scenario will play out today is another matter, but the elements of a major humiliation for Israel already exist.
Sending a message
Only a standard Hamas security procedure of moving venue after the participants of a meeting had gathered, and separating participants from their mobile phones, saved Meshaal and the entire Hamas negotiating team from extinction in Doha on Tuesday.
The building they were in was very close to the one that Israeli planes hit, and the timing of the bombing was right, but they got the wrong building, senior Hamas sources told me.
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As the truth began to dawn, Israeli reaction turned quickly from jubilation that they had wiped out the leadership of Hamas, in the same manner as they had despatched the leadership of Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, to mutual recrimination.
Initially, Yair Lapid, the leader of the opposition who had made such a point of campaigning for the release of the hostages, congratulated the Israeli Air Force and Shin Bet “on an exceptional operation to thwart our enemies”.
That X post had to be rapidly replaced by the following: “Hamas members are sons of death, but at this stage the Israeli government needs to explain how the [Israeli army’s] operation will not lead to the killing of the hostages, and whether the risk to the hostages’ lives was taken into account in the decision to carry out the operation. It is forbidden to wait any longer. The war must be ended and they must be brought back home.”
The operation to kill the Hamas leadership as it was convening to discuss a negotiating document sent by US President Donald Trump was dubbed by Israel as the “Summit of Fire”.
This was an act of a Jewish supremacist state that is supremacist not just in Palestine, but throughout the region as a whole. It was not as if Netanyahu and the planners of this attack had given no thought to the implications of bombing Qatar.
Quite the contrary. They wanted to send a message to Qatar, or any other Arab state hosting Hamas, that Israel can do what it wants; that its military can roam the region to strike any target at will any time, irrespective of sovereignty, or whose airspace they must fly over to get there. Netanyahu has also threatened to hit Hamas members in Turkey. The strike on Qatar told Ankara it could be next.
Bombing negotiations
For political scientist Menachem Klein, Israel has become a genocidal society that has abandoned diplomacy and will only do things by force.
He told Middle East Eye: “Israel is a genocide society; it is a society that decided that there is no diplomacy, there is only force… It’s beyond Palestine: it’s Iran, it’s Syria - he has threatened to hit Hamas members in Turkey, and threats were exchanged with [President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan.”
Israel has also shown “a lack of consideration for Egypt and certainly in Yemen. It’s basically forced engineering of the entire region,” Klein added.
“The raison d’etre of this coalition is Jewish supremacy. It’s a regime of Jewish supremacy, and it wants to establish Jewish supremacy not only in Palestine, but in the entire region by means of force - also inside Israel, against the Palestinians in the West Bank, and also against the Palestinians of 1948.”
If the Israeli strike does not clearly convey to Trump that following meekly in the footsteps of a rogue state led by religious fundamentalists will damage his standing as a world leader, then nothing will
Netanyahu’s campaign to re-engineer the region has huge implications not just for Israel’s neighbours, but for all states near and far from the country’s borders: for the Gulf Cooperation Council states, and for those who have normalised relations with Israel by signing the Abraham Accords.
In the short term, bombing Hamas meant bombing the negotiators. Had the attack succeeded, there would have been no one left in Hamas to negotiate with; no one with authority to tell any of the remaining guards in Gaza to release their prisoners.
Not only that, but had the air strike succeeded, Operation Summit of Fire would have meant the end of all attempts to get the remaining hostages back alive.
By bombing Hamas, Israel was bombing the negotiation process itself. Egyptian mediation has already ended, and it’s hard to see how Qatari mediation can continue. So even now, with the Hamas team alive, all negotiations to release the hostages in Gaza are probably over.
The reality has been obvious to anyone who has followed the negotiations over the last two years. Netanyahu has thwarted seven separate attempts to get a deal, including deals his own negotiating team had initialled. But now, it’s obvious to everyone that he wants to end all negotiations and resolve Gaza by force alone.
Troubling implications
The only remaining avenue is for US envoy Steve Witkoff to take over the process and negotiate directly with Hamas himself, over Israel’s head. But that would mean his boss having to force Israel to stop its ground operation in Gaza City, which he has been reluctant to do.
Besides, if Trump knew of Israel’s Doha operation in advance and green-lit it by failing to stop it, what value is there in any future guarantee he could give to Hamas that if they release all hostages, the war would stop and Israel would withdraw?
This is the second time that Israel has used an active negotiation process as cover to launch a surprise attack. The first was its June assault on Iran, which began days before Iranian and US negotiators were due to meet in Oman about Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme.
In this case, the Hamas negotiating committee was convening to discuss a ceasefire proposal Trump himself had written. It should be clear to all that Trump’s guarantees are worthless.
But in the longer term, the implications of this failed air strike are much more troubling for Arab heads of state.
Let us not delude ourselves. The second generation of Arab autocrats who have taken over the reins in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain hate Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah even more than Netanyahu does.
But the effect of Israel’s operation is much wider than this. It is to challenge them personally as leaders of their own airspace and their own countries.
As in 1997, the failed strike on Hamas will immediately be a huge boost to the reputation of the movement, which is proscribed as a terrorist group in the UK and other countries.
The options for them are closing their airspace to all Israeli flights, or for the UAE and Bahrain to pull out of, or suspend, their membership in the Abraham Accords
No longer will any local commentator be able to accuse the political leadership in Doha of living in luxury in five-star hotels while Gaza starves. They will now be seen to be on the front line of the struggle with Israel.
It will also serve as an object lesson to the government in Lebanon, which is attempting to force Hezbollah to disarm nationally. Hezbollah’s argument that its disarming would lead to Lebanon being completely vulnerable to the whims of Israel only gathers force.
Those pushing to enforce the US-Saudi plan to disarm Hezbollah were stopped temporarily by the wiser Lebanese army command, amid fears that fighting could break out if the government’s decisions were enforced.
Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Jordan in particular will have to think about how far they can defy the opinions of their own people, and just how weak it makes them look if, as Israeli sources are now claiming, they secretly let Israeli fighters reach Doha. According to Ynet’s military correspondent, the attack in Qatar was “carried out in coordination with other countries”.
The options for them are closing their airspace to all Israeli flights, or for the UAE and Bahrain to pull out of, or suspend their membership in, the Abraham Accords. The Emiratis have already said that Israel formally annexing the West Bank would be a “red line” for them.
Netanyahu losing credibility
Netanyahu has had a bad week. It started on Monday with the shooting attack in Jerusalem that killed six Israelis, and the deaths of four soldiers in Gaza. Hamas claimed responsibility for both operations.
For someone who has declared more than once in the last two years that Israel is on the verge of victory, Netanyahu is quickly losing credibility at home.
Hamas is fighting as ferociously today as it did on day one, and Israeli civilians and troops are dying in ever-increasing numbers.
On Tuesday, Netanyahu failed to wipe out Hamas’s leadership, but instead could have wiped out all attempts to end the two-year conflict by negotiations. Hamas, on the other hand, has only gained in reputation.
Trump is officially “unhappy” about the failed military operation and has attempted to distance himself from it, saying that the first he heard of it was from his own military chiefs. This, despite the fact that in its first briefings to correspondents, the White House was quick to say it knew about the strike.
If the Israeli strike does not clearly convey to Trump that following meekly in the footsteps of a rogue state led by religious fundamentalists will damage his standing as a world leader, then nothing will. Trump is a man who feels personal slights keenly and remembers them. This one was delivered by his closest ally.
But this strike, first and foremost, is a wake-up call to the region as a whole. The US security umbrella, for which they paid so handsomely on Trump’s last visit to the region, is worthless. The Abraham Accords are a myth too. No peace can be achieved by recognising Israel.
Only through a robust regional security alliance to contain Israel - by Israel being forced to feel how small a land it really is, and to pay the price of its diplomatic and economic isolation - will Netanyahu’s hegemonic ambitions meet their true end.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
