Arabs Ratchet Up Anti-Israel Rhetoric at Doha as Rubio Urges Unity Behind the Goal of Eradicating Hamas

On the fifth anniversary of the Abraham Accords signing, Qatar is striving to unify Arabs against Israel, while America is attempting to convince Gulf allies that cooler heads must prevail. As Arab heads of state arrived at Doha Monday, their host, Emir Tamim bin Hamad al Thani, said that Israel is pursuing “racist terrorist practices,” and that it dreams of “turning the Arab region into an Israeli sphere of influence.” Secretary Marco Rubio made clear at a Jerusalem press conference alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he will try to tamp down the anger displayed by Qatar’s emir when he next travels to the Gulf state. “We’re trying to get everybody to stay focused on what happens moving forward, not just only focused on what’s already happened last week in Doha,” he told Fox News.At the Doha summit, though, Arab leaders, including some of Israel’s closest allies, expressed solidarity with Qatar, and some even urged Abraham Accord signatories to sever ties with Israel in response to its airstrikes against Hamas targets at Doha last week.That outcome is unlikely, a veteran Haifa University Mideast studies professor, Amatzia Bar’am, tells the Sun. “They might recall their ambassador to Israel for consultations, or summon the Israeli ambassador in their country for a dressing down,” he says. Arabs are apt to issue strong statements at these summits, he adds, but they have little interest in ending ties with Israel.Arab states “unite when they perceive a shared danger,” Mr. Bar’am says. “In 1945, the Arab League met in Lebanon to agree on preventing the establishment of a Jewish state. Now they meet to ensure that the Jewish state will not attack them.”Following the strike on the Hamas Qatar office “our message is clear: We will not accept any aggression against the sovereignty of our country,” President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt said at Doha Monday. Arab “response to the aggression against Qatar must be clear and resolute,” added Jordan’s King Abdullah II.Qatar, though, has long angered Arab neighbors who consider the emirate hostile to their regimes. In 2017, a Saudi-led bloc of Arab countries that included Egypt and Jordan imposed an embargo on the emirate and severed ties with Doha. Qatar’s isolation finally ended in 2021 under American pressure. The Doha summit is “absolute theater,” an executive director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Jonathan Schanzer, tells the Sun. The Qataris are “trying to capitalize on a crisis that they created. They’ve been sponsoring terrorism since the early 2000s. Let’s just remember that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, found shelter in Qatar.”Doha “is like the cantina scene in ‘Star Wars,’” Mr. Schanzer says. It shelters operatives of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood parent, and the Houthis. “The surprise to me is that there have not been more operations that have removed these people,” he says. On Monday, Qatar, a sponsor of Sunni terrorists, embraced President Masoud Pezeshkian of the Islamist Republic of Iran. “These two forces have been at the forefront of every violent action in the Middle East for decades,” Mr Schanzer says.As the Iranian guest warned that “no Arab state is safe” from Israel, Israelis pointed to Iran’s June missile attack on Qatar’s Al Udeid American Air Force base. And behind closed doors, “Arab leaders praise the Israeli operation,” a member of Mr. Netanyahu’s government, Eli Cohen, told the Kan broadcaster Monday.Speaking recently to a Gulf diplomat, though, Mr. Schanzer says he heard real concern that “after many years of dodging bullets, after many years of avoiding the direct confrontations that characterize other parts of the Middle East, there is a sense that maybe they can’t out-run it any longer.” The Gulf countries were mostly unscathed by the Iraq war 20 years ago. In the last decade they mostly held at bay the Arab Spring that shook other parts of the region. The Syrian and Lebanese turmoil seemed distant, and the Palestinian wars hardly touched them. Now that the Iranian-backed Houthis are imposing a Red Sea blockade and Israel is striking Doha, concerns are rising. Mr. Netanyahu said Monday that the message of last week’s strike was more important than whether all those who were targeted were killed. That message, he said, is that Israel will hit Hamas leaders “wherever they are.” Israel, he added, acted alone. America too is working to end the Gaza war by eradicating Hamas and releasing all hostages, Mr. Rubio said at Jerusalem. It is “a shared goal, not just to the United States and Israel, but of multiple countries around the world and certainly in the region who want to see the same outcome.”

Arabs Ratchet Up Anti-Israel Rhetoric at Doha as Rubio Urges Unity Behind the Goal of Eradicating Hamas

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