It has long been a source of mystery and intrigue that Qatar, a country smaller than Connecticut, could at once host Hamas leaders and Taliban envoys while also serving as the site of Al Udeid, the largest American military base on foreign soil. But this contradiction—the very basis of Doha’s power—didn’t only allow the tiny emirate to turn its weakness into indispensability by perfecting a politics of ambiguity. It also served Washington, Europe, and the wider neoliberal system, which relied on Qatar’s duplicity as the very mechanism through which the Israel-Palestine conflict—and by extension, much of the system of regional politics—was managed rather than solved, preserved rather than overcome. With Israel’s bombing of Qatar, an entire system of managed incoherence that thrived on the perpetuation of contradictions faces its severest test.
Israel’s strike on Hamas leadership in Doha has breached a regional taboo and torn open the assumptions on which Qatar’s indispensability rested—and, by extension, the logic of the American-managed order itself.
