An Israeli television station aired last week a recording in which Prime Minister Netanyahu said it was “problematic” that Doha was acting as mediator between Israel and the Hamas terrorist group. Qatar’s foreign ministry spokesman, Majed Al Ansari, said that “if the reported remarks are found to be true, the Israeli prime minister would only be obstructing and undermining the mediation process.”

In a nationally-televised press conference Saturday, Mr. Netanyahu aired his statement publicly. “I don’t retract a word I said,” he told reporters. “Qatar is hosting Hamas officials. It is financing Hamas and has leverage over Hamas. They assumed the role of mediator, let them prove it and, at least for now, ensure that medication is supplied to the abductees.”

Mr. Al Ansari referred specifically to efforts to free Israeli hostages still being kept captive by Hamas. The testy exchange will be in the rear view mirror this weekend as the director of the CIA, William Burns, and the Mossad chief, David Barnea, meet with the Qatari prime minister and foreign minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani Sunday in Paris.

The pressure is on for some sort of deal that would see the release of more than 100 remaining hostages, six Israel-Americans among them. The spat over a few moments of Israeli candor, though, raises the long-term question of whether Qatar is itself a reliable regional player. The issue certainly haunts many in the West, and even some in the Middle East.

Especially since it seems that many, if not all, roads now lead in one way or another to Doha. The negotiations for the release of hostages in Gaza and another potential prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas, as well as the still tenuous threads about the future of the Gaza Strip, all seem to flow through this little country with a less than squeaky clean reputation. 

In Europe, Qatar is associated with the scandals of the World Cup: to wit, complaints about serious work accidents, deaths on under-supervised construction sites, and human rights abuses against immigrants who were hired to build the facilities for the high-profile sports event. Then there was Qatargate, the investigation by the Belgian judiciary launched just over a year ago into bribes paid to some members of the European Parliament.

To that ignominy add the disclosure that Qatar has for years financed Hamas, whose political leaders have often lived in the lap of luxury in modern highrise hotels at Doha. Even some of its immediate neighbors may wince at the outsize role in driving world events that Qatar has taken on recently.

Saudi Arabia, for one, has in the past accused Qatar of supporting subversive forces in the region — from Iran to the various militias that the ayatollahs outfit with arms. Then there is the  Qatari television network Al Jazeera, which Saudis and others consider to be a backer of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The litany of  complaints from  neighbors and the Arab League caused a diplomatic crisis when, from 2017 to 2021, Qatar was subject to an embargo. According to some reports, Doha feared a Saudi-led military invasion. Turkey even sent a military contingent.

Qatar belongs to a borderline region between Sunni and Shiite Islam, and as such is exposed to the religious strife fomented by the fundamentalist regime at Tehran. It is  a peninsula that literally juts into the Persian Gulf, and politically has to navigate some choppy waters.

Qatar’s monarchy justifies its opaque foreign policy by the constraints of geography. The peninsula overlooks the gulf opposite Iran, with which it shares the same natural gas field (even if Tehran barely manages to exploit it). Qatar considers itself, if not cornered, then obliged to come to terms with such a crude and toothy neighbor.

At the same time, the Qatari peninsula hosts the Al Udeid Air Base, the largest American military base in the Middle East. By welcoming the Yanks, Qatar has consolidated a singular position in the volatile Gulf region. If ever there were a place where the devil and holy water can meet on supposedly neutral ground, it is this.

As for the presence of top Hamas henchmen at Doha, it was long an open secret — by some accounts a neutral place to talk was what underpinned that Faustian bargain. The flow of funds from Qatar to Gaza — that is, mainly to Hamas —  was accepted or even encouraged by President Obama more than ten years ago. 

It was also at Doha that American and Taliban emissaries met to negotiate the conditions of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. Now war to its north is magnifying Qatar’s role as the Switzerland of the Gulf. Al Jazeera keeps hammering away — from Gaza it gives air time almost exclusively to Hamas’ version of reality. 

The so-called news programs are a continuous bombardment of one-way images: the victims are only ever shown as Palestinian Arabs and the Israelis are made out to be the bad guys. Worse, much of the Arab world has only that  brainwashing as their source of news. 

In any event, whether Doha is a sort of misunderstood good guy or indispensable villain might be splitting hairs.  Everyone from Washington to Jerusalem, it seems, has placed their bets on a tiny country with big aspirations but some troubling friendships.  Under such challenging circumstances, it would only be surprising were Mr. Netanyahu not to grouse.