The latest tweets by US Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt have surprised many. He tweeted Feb. 9, for instance, about the suffering of the Gaza Strip’s residents and the concern for the burden they are enduring under Hamas rule, and thanked Egypt for agreeing to open the Rafah crossing into Gaza to let people and goods in and out. Greenblatt also argued for the first time — and one cannot ignore the fact that he speaks for the Trump administration — that only cooperation between Israel and Qatar would save Gaza.
Greenblatt linked one of his tweets to an interview with Mohammed al-Emadi, the head of Qatar’s Gaza reconstruction committee, who explained to The Associated Press, “When you want to do work in Gaza, you have to go through the Israelis.” Emadi visited the Gaza Strip several times since the 2014 war between Gaza and Israel. In March 2015, he met with Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, to discuss the execution of major projects in Gaza with Qatari funding.
The idea of Israeli-Qatari cooperation came up in recent weeks in Washington after President Donald Trump spoke with Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani on Jan. 15. A few days before that phone call, in a Jan. 12 article that ran on the political website “The Hill,” Trump’s friend and confidant attorney Alan Dershowitz wrote that he had just returned from a visit to the emirate, where the emir had adamantly denied any Qatari support for Hamas or Iran. Dershowitz, a longtime supporter of Israel, opined that therefore, Qatari investment in rebuilding Gaza’s infrastructure must be carried out in coordination with Israel. The article praised Qatar and gave it a stamp of approval despite the sanctions imposed on the small Arab state by two major US allies in the region, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
The ties between Qatar and Hamas were never a secret. The emirate welcomed the movement’s political bureau and its former leader Khaled Meshaal and provided them with a warm home; the movement’s current head, Ismail Haniyeh, refers to the emirate as Hamas’ sworn friend. Former Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Tamim’s father, visited Gaza after the 2012 military clash between Hamas and Israel, traveled through the Gaza Strip in a black Mercedes driven by Haniyeh and pledged to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in rehabilitation projects.
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