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Sheikhs and Emirs of Capital Between the Massacre in Gaza and the Attack on Qatar

According to Herzi Halevi, former chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), more than 200,000 Palestinians have been killed or injured in the war in Gaza: Not once in the course of the conflict were military operations inhibited by legal advice [...] This isn't a gentle war. We took the gloves off from the first minute. According to The Times of Israel, a newspaper close to the Netanyahu government, Halevi's estimate is close to that provided by Palestinian sources of 64,000 dead and 165,000 wounded and, according to intelligence reports from Tel Aviv, 80% of those Palestinians killed so far [...] are civilians. The war in Gaza represents the bloodiest chapter in the Hundred Years' War in Palestine.

The conflict has taken the form of a series of duels that Tel Aviv has engaged in successively: from Lebanon to Syria, from Yemen to Iran; from the confrontation with the components of the so-called Axis of Resistance set up by Tehran to the attack on Syrian nuclear sites in the twelve days war, which ended with Washington's airstrikes. According to a report by the Israeli secret services handed over to the French authorities, writes Le Monde, Tehran is currently too weak to restart its nuclear programme in the short term, but it is only a matter of time. The military balance currently favours Tel Aviv, which has reconfirmed its military superiority in the region and restored its deterrence capability, called into question on October 7th, 2023.

The language of force

According to the conservative daily The Jerusalem Post, the September 9th raid against Hamas leaders in Doha signals a fundamental turning point: Israel is speaking the language the Middle East actually understands, that of force, announcing a change in the rules of engagement. For 30 years, the commentary continues, Hamas has enjoyed the Qatar privilege, orchestrating its terrorism with impunity from the Doha haven. Western powers misread how power operates in the region, which is a geopolitical powder keg.

This led to the belief that Israel would not dare to attack the Hamas leadership on the territory of a US ally, believing that Washington would prevent it. The fact that the Middle East only understands victory and defeat is not a stereotype, but a recognition of the different nature of the region, where State collapse is more common than elsewhere and tribal dynamics remain strong; strength signals legitimacy, and weakness invites aggression. Israel is demonstrating that it will act unilaterally to protect its interests, freeing itself from any diplomatic constraints.

Tactical success and diplomatic cost

However, The Jerusalem Post itself, in its editorial, notes that the Doha raid represented a tactical success but also left Israel blunted on the strategic level: it alarmed its allies, alienated its partners, and imposed a checkmate on the endgame in Gaza. Tel Aviv's legitimacy in continuing the conflict in the Strip has long since been exhausted and there is no political horizon in sight. Israel has an eternal enemy, but it cannot have an eternal war. While the Trump administration seems to have given some tacit approval to the raid, striking the tiny Gulf emirate, which hosts the main US base in the Gulf and is a major gas and financial power, has repercussions for the credibility of Washington's security guarantees that go far beyond the region.

While Tel Aviv's immediate calculation is to obtain some form of surrender from Hamas, an implicit signal has been sent to all regional powers. Among these is Turkey, which hosts representatives of Hamas and uses this as a card in its own policy in the Levant. A dispute is underway with Ankara over the definition of spheres of influence in Syria. While Israel regularly strikes Syrian military installations, Turkey plays a role in the reorganisation of Damascus' armed forces. Tel Aviv has offered itself as a guarantor of the Syrian Druze minorities and last July intervened in their support in clashes with Bedouin tribes and Damascus forces in southern Syria. It then raised the possibility of extending its defence to the Alawite minority, even suggesting a protectorate over the Alawite and Druze enclaves, without excluding the Kurds. This was a response to the theory, circulated in the Turkish press, that the Sunni full moon, i.e., a Turkish-Saudi entente, would rise over the Levant after the setting of the Shia half-moon, i.e., the exercise of Iranian influence.

Washington's guarantees with an asterisk

For Sabah, a newspaper close to the Erdogan presidency, the assault on Qatar [...] symbolises the unravelling of the Anglo-American security architecture that has been in place for half a century: if Doha, a wealthy ally deeply embedded in Western networks, can be attacked with impunity, then the old deal – petrodollars in exchange for security guarantees – is broken. No one, neither Saudi Arabia, nor the UAE, nor any Arab State, can believe that money alone will buy safety. The Gulf nations will be forced to seek new alliances. This is a role that Ankara has long been a candidate for: since the crisis between Doha and Riyadh over relations with Tehran and the war in Yemen, Turkey has had troops deployed in Qatar.

For its part, Qatar has evoked an American betrayal in Washington's behaviour, which, according to the Financial Times, offers its allies security guarantees with an asterisk, i.e., selective ones. Doha suggests that it may activate other security ties with Turkey, India, Indonesia, China, and Russia. Moscow has already supplied S-400 surface-to-air missile systems in the past. The Emirates have military agreements with Delhi and, as Henry Kissinger pointed out in World Order [2014], Pakistan acts as Riyadh's nuclear armourer. According to French diplomatic sources, Qatar will immediately remind Trump that if he fails to restrain Netanyahu, the butcher of Gaza, Doha may fail to honour the [huge] financial commitments made last May during the US president's visit to the Gulf monarchies. These would include, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent noted, guarantees to purchase US debt issues by Gulf sovereign wealth funds. But there may also be an allusion to the Trump family's private business dealings with Doha and those of its associates, such as Special Envoy Steve Witkoff.

According to Haaretz, the attack on Qatar has received widespread internal support in Israel, as the emirate is one of Hamas' main financiers, a role it played with Netanyahu's approval until October 7th. Jonathan Eyal, a commentator for Singapore's The Straits Times, recalls how it was normal to see queues of Gazans waiting for the monthly distribution of one crisp banknote of $100 per adult from Qatari oil rent. Another point of consensus, the newspaper continues, is the military eradication of Hamas. On top of this, the Israeli prime minister wants to ensure the fragmentation of Palestinian territory, and in doing so he finds possible allies in the West Bank.

The Pakistani bomb

At the time of writing, the security agreements between Riyadh and Islamabad, which extend to Saudi Arabia the guarantee of Pakistani nuclear deterrence, and the diplomatic breakthrough by France and Britain, which declare their recognition of a Palestinian State, have just become public knowledge.

The agreement between the Saudis and the Pakistani generals upsets the nuclear balance in the Gulf and the Middle East, with all the implications this will have for regional and global powers, starting with China, which is Pakistan's military patron. Emmanuel Macron's move, also agreed with Saudi Arabia, could define a European strategy and is in fact viewed with alarm by the American press. With the attack on Qatar, which struck the Gulf's energy artery, Israel may have crossed a red line and triggered a dynamic of unintended consequences.

Sheikhs of capital in Hebron

In early July, The Wall Street Journal, in collaboration with The Jerusalem Post, published a lengthy interview with Wadee' al-Jaabari, one of about twenty sheikhs in Hebron, the major economic centre of the West Bank, with 750,000 inhabitants and a third of the GDP of the Palestinian territories. Al-Jaabari, together with four other local sheikhs, is said to have put himself forward to lead Hebron as an emirate of its own, independent from the PNA, in exchange for recognition of the Jewish State and an agreement on a territorial partition to replace the Oslo Accords. The sheikh denounces the PNA as a corrupt entity and alien to the authentic local leadership that has existed since the time of Saladin and subsequently acted as an intermediary with the Ottoman Empire. This proposal was reportedly drawn up in agreement with Nir Barkat, Israel's minister of economy. Barkat, a high-tech entrepreneur, was mayor of Jerusalem for ten years, first as a representative of civil society, for Kadima – the defunct centrist party created by Ariel Sharon in the 2000s – and then for Likud. Like al-Jaabari, he has ties to settler organisations.

Barkat reportedly promised the creation of an economic zone of spanning more than a thousand acres on the border between Hebron and Israel, capable of employing up to 50,000 Palestinian workers. The answer to the dilemma of one State or two States would be the emirate model, devised by Mordechai Kedar, an academic with a background in military intelligence: in practice, this means creating a confederation of seven Palestinian emirates in the West Bank, modelled on the UAE, which would recognise Israel. For Kedar, the only successful models of Arab States are the Gulf monarchies, supported by the continuity of [their families'] traditions.

The Jaabari-Barkat initiative has been described as a trial balloon by The Jerusalem Post and is opposed by the security services, which rely on the collaboration with the PNA to control the West Bank and fear the risk of triggering a Palestinian civil war. Ultimately, it appears to be an update of the West Bank mayors model, with which Tel Aviv attempted to exploit local notables to counter Fatah in the 1970s and 1980s, or something similar to the Bantustan model used by apartheid South Africa, exploiting tribal loyalties.

All true, and the initiative may remain a dead letter. But it confirms what our analysis stated in the early 1980s: The Palestinian populations of the West Bank and Gaza, under Israeli military occupation, have a stable settlement and a social stratification that culminates in a property-owning bourgeoisie, whose representatives influence certain fractions of the PLO on the one hand, and on the other hand collaborate economically with the Israeli bourgeoisie in a market that, despite a permanent state of war, is booming [Arrigo Cervetto, La contesa mondiale]. This is further proof that both in the carnage of Gaza and in the Middle Eastern feuds over blood and oil, the internationalist and class principle is the only compass. There is a bourgeoisie and there is a proletariat in Palestine, in Israel, and everywhere else in the Middle East.

Lotta Comunista, September 2025

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