The announcement of a possible “humanitarian pause” in the Gaza Strip can be considered a triumph for the small Persian Gulf nation of Qatar.

Early on Wednesday morning, the Qatari Foreign Ministry put out a statement announcing a four day “pause” during which all sides — the Israeli military, the militant Hamas group and Hezbollah’s armed wing in Lebanon — would agree to stop fighting. This would allow for the release of 50 hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, in exchange for the release of around 150 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. It would also allow desperately needed humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip.

The Hamas-held hostages would be women and children and the Palestinian prisoners released from Israeli jails would also be mainly women and minors aged under 18.  

On October 7, Hamas, which is considered a terrorist organization by the US, EU and others, launched an attack out of Gaza that killed around 1,200 Israelis and foreigners. The militant group also took an estimated 240 hostages back into the Gaza Strip. Since the attack, Israel has been bombing the around-360-square-kilometer enclave and has also prevented most water, food, fuel and medical supplies from entering.

In the past six weeks, 13,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to health officials in the Hamas-controlled territory. 

The hostage negotiations have been going on for weeks. At one stage, the Israeli government reportedly turned down a similar offer in favor of launching its ground offensive into Gaza. However, pressure has grown — from the international community, from Israel’s major ally, the US, and from the families of hostages who have demanded that their government focus on freeing their relatives.

Egypt, which signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1979 and shares a border with Israel and Gaza, has also helped in the negotiations. But it is Qatar that is seen as leading them.

After the Qatari announcement, US President Joe Biden and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken posted messages on X (formerly Twitter) thanking Egypt and Qatar for their “critical partnership” in the negotiations.

Previously even Israel’s national security adviser Tzachi Hanegbi had praised Qatar’s role, writing on social media that, “Qatar’s diplomatic efforts are crucial at this time.”

But not everyone is so pleased with the small Gulf state. Some commentators said negotiators should have tried harder to secure the release of more hostages. Others argued that because Qatar has been home to Hamas’ political leadership since 2012, it was somehow complicit in Hamas’ attacks.

Qatar has regularly said it supports the “Palestinian cause.”

Foreign policy tightrope

Experts agree that Qatar is walking a fine line when it comes to its foreign policy, playing the “Switzerland of the Middle East” and keeping doors open to all comers.

“Qatar’s role is particularly sensitive because the emirate has been relying on being an intermediary for well over two decades now,” Guido Steinberg, a senior associate at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told DW recently.

In the past, Qatar has also acted as an interlocutor between the international community and the Taliban in Afghanistan (who also have political offices in Doha), between the US and Iran, and even Russia and Ukraine. It also hosts the largest US military headquarters in the Middle East, al-Udeid Air Base, which played a significant role in evacuations from Afghanistan in 2021. This led to Qatar being described as “major non-NATO ally.”

The country has also already mediated between Israel and Hamas — such as during the 2014  Israel-Gaza War. Qatar froze relations with Israel in 2009 but allegedly maintains a relationship behind the scenes. In 1996, at a time when other countries in the region were firmly opposed to any ties at all with Israel, Qatar allowed the state to open a trade mission in Doha.

“Qatar has long had a pragmatic relationship where it has used financial incentives to manage and de-escalate various rounds of tensions and war between Israel and Hamas,” Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at the UK-based think tank Chatham House told DW last month. Vakil saw Qatar as “a natural go-between to secure the hostages and find entry points to de-escalate and protect people on the ground as the humanitarian issue worsens.”

Qatar operates in a kind of grey zone, Joel Simon, a US journalist and author of the 2019 book, “We Want to Negotiate: The Secret World of Kidnapping, Hostages, and Ransom,” wrote in the US weekly magazine The New Yorker last week.

“Though the country’s officials say that they are guided by humanitarian principles and a desire to reduce conflict and promote stability, they have clearly used their leverage to gain influence and visibility, a posture which they believe enhances their security in a volatile region,” he explained. Playing both sides makes Qatar a valuable ally and Qatar knows it, he concluded.

Big spender in Gaza

In the recent past, Qatar was spending an estimated $30 million (€27.4 million) a month on Gaza. But the arguments around this money are yet another example of how fraught Qatar’s role is when it comes to Palestinians and Hamas.

Some have suggested Qatari money subsidizes Hamas’ military wing and is used for nefarious purposes. Hamas has ruled the enclave since 2007 and also manages payments for the civil administration of Gaza.

Replying to Reuters queries about the Gaza money last month, a Qatari government official told the news agency that its cash was for needy families and the salaries of civil servants, including doctors and teachers, in the impoverished enclave. The UN says that 80% of Gaza Strip inhabitants were dependent on international aid even before the current crisis, due to the blockade Israel established after Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, two years after Israel withdrew from it.

Qatari money actually goes through Israel, the Qatari official explained to Reuters. It’s transferred electronically to Israel, which then passes it on to the Hamas-run Gaza authorities, and all payments are “fully coordinated with Israel, the UN and the US,” they said.

US officials note that Hamas’ fundraising system is wide, varied and intricate. Some money, including that coming from Qatar, is likely being used illegitimately, they have suggested, along with other funding, such as that from Iran, which plays a major role in supporting Hamas — as do other financial intermediaries around the world. For example, after the October 7 attack, the US sanctioned further entities it associates with funding Hamas, including an intermediary in Qatar as well as others in Sudan, Turkey and Algeria.

Will Qatar’s role change now?

Despite Qatar’s success in this round of negotiations, one outcome of the current conflict appears to be an agreement between Qatar and the US that the Gulf state will have to distance itself from Hamas further after the current conflict quiets down.

In mid-October, over 100 US politicians demanded that Qatar expel Hamas officials from the country. “The country’s links to Hamas…are simply unacceptable,” a letter addressed to the US president stated.

At the same time, the Qatari leadership has stated that it thinks further diplomacy is the answer for peace.

“The Qatari-negotiated deal between Israel and Hamas marks the first important diplomatic gain since the start of the war,” Hugh Lovatt, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, confirmed. And this is “an opportunity to wedge open space to advance a full ceasefire predicated on a wider diplomatic pathway,” he said in a statement to DW. 

But as others have pointed out, if Qatar expels Hamas officials altogether, the militant group’s representatives may well end up in another country far less disposed to help anybody out, should further diplomacy be required.

Before 2012, Hamas’ political leadership was based in Syria.

Source : DW

The post Hamas-Israel: Qatar’s Foreign Policy Balancing Act Pays Off appeared first on Policy Print.

Covering hundreds of pages on how other governments have “jailed, tortured, or even killed” political opponents, human rights defenders, and journalists, the report kept silent on the thousands of Americans who have lost their lives due to mass shootings, police brutality, and racism discrimination, said the journal.

“America’s historical trajectory shows that it has always viewed human rights as a tool for hegemony and uses it selectively as an excuse to label countries as human rights violators. Under the pretext of defending human rights, the U.S. invaded Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan, but all of these war-torn countries suffered the murder of innocent civilians and catastrophic infrastructure destruction,” it noted.

“Sadly, the U.S. does not uphold the common international standards or guarantee human rights from a fair and impartial standpoint when promoting human rights diplomacy and managing human rights matters. It always exercises double or even multiple standards,” it said.

“Critics argue that the annual report has nothing to do with human rights but is a tool to malign rivals and coerce other countries,” it added.

The post U.S. Human Rights Report Vital Tool for Foreign Policy Goals: Eurasia Review appeared first on Policy Print.

In a stark reversal of all previous versions, the 2023 concept devotes most attention to cooperation with non-Western states. China and India are each mentioned, though only briefly. Considering the Sino-Russian “no-limits partnership” announced just before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the language on “mutually beneficial cooperation” and “strengthening the comprehensive partnership” with China is remarkably cautious and restrained. The concept waxes far more enthusiastically about relations with Latin America, and especially the Islamic world and Africa. The latter merited a single paragraph in 2016 and is now portrayed at length as a “distinctive and influential center of world development” threatened by the West’s “sophisticated neo-colonial policy.”

While the 2016 concept held out the prospect of deeper cooperation with NATO, the EU, and individual Western states, the situation in 2023 is dramatically different.

On the one hand, the concept portrays the West as emphatically hostile. America and its “satellites” pursue a “longstanding anti-Russian policy … aimed at weakening Russia in every possible way.” Most European states are “creating threats to the security and sovereignty of the Russian Federation, gaining unilateral economic advantages, undermining domestic political stability and eroding traditional Russian spiritual and moral values.” Strikingly, the concept repeatedly mentions Western efforts to undermine not merely Russia’s interests but its territorial integrity.

On the other hand, the concept envisages a future security order once European states “realize the futility of their confrontational policy and hegemonic ambitions,” free themselves from U.S. dominance, and are ready to cooperate in a “new model of coexistence” with Russia.

As for the United States, the “main inspirer, organizer and executor” of anti-Russian policy, the concept suggests that in due course it could seek a more constructive relationship to secure a balance of interests. There is a whiff of Cold War detente in its revival of the Soviet term “peaceful coexistence” and its reference to “strategic parity.”

The concept also outlines Russia’s response to the escalation of Western coercive economic statecraft against it. It calls for the creation of “world trade and monetary and financial systems” against abuse of “monopoly or dominant position in certain areas of the world economy.” These are clear hints of Russia’s efforts to evade sanctions with new currencies and new payment infrastructures. Russia will take “symmetrical and asymmetric measures” against states that use sanctions or “information and communication technologies” to threaten Russia’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

This response to rapid recent international changes is strangely backward-looking. Much of it recalls the Cold War: a weakening West in a crisis-ridden world; bright vistas of cooperation with the Global South against “Western hegemony,” and, most remarkably, the possibility of achieving a “balance of interests” with the United States based on a shared “special responsibility for strategic stability and international security.”

Yet Russia is not a superpower equal to the U.S. — its power is diminished; it has far fewer allies, even in the Global South, than at any point in the Cold War; and its most important relationship — barely mentioned in the concept — is with a more powerful China. Russia’s reality, felt by much of its elite, is one of disorientation and isolation.

Source: Moscow Times

The post Russia’s Updated Foreign Policy Strategy is Revealingly Delusional appeared first on Policy Print.