Qatargate and Washington
Summary: much has been made of Qatar’s relationship with both Hamas and the Netanyahu government as a sinister plot; a Washington insider says the reality is far more mundane.
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On 19 September Ruth Margalit published a lengthy piece in The New Yorker on the Qatargate scandal in Israel that involved allegations Benjamin Netanyahu’s close advisers secretly ran a paid influence campaign for Qatar, placing pro-Qatari narratives in media and leaking classified information to manipulate public opinion and maintain influence during the Gaza war. She clearly had access to a lot of emails and texts that were exchanged between the Israeli participants and she put them to good use describing the relationships among some of Benjamin Netanyahu’s closest public relations advisors. The reader gets a vivid sense of the irrational exuberance that overtook those advisors: Yisrael Einhorn (a Tel Aviv music producer/performer turned political strategist for Netanyahu's Likud party), Eli Feldstein (a spokesperson brought on as the "foot soldier" to plant stories), and Jonatan Urich (Netanyahu’s top strategic adviser who simultaneously worked for the PR firm Perception allegedly taking a percentage of Qatari retainer payments.) They convinced themselves that they were masters of the PR universe able to use their Midas’ touch to turn every tweet into gold.
However, woven into the fabric of her story – interspersed with these undeniably juicy tidbits of gossip – are a series of master narratives that cut against the grain of what I understood to be the truth at the time. And given my close contacts both in the Gulf and in Washington throughout the period in question, I thought it might be interesting to Arab Digest’s readers if I shared a few of those impressions.
The lobbyist Jay Footlik who features in the Margalit article was not just some failed amateur actor or failed politician (he had a very short-lived run for a Congressional seat at one point). I never sought out his friendship and I didn’t think he was right for the Qataris but I can say that I had a certain degree of respect for him. He had become involved in helping to organise trips for prominent Americans to Israel, sometime back in the late 1990s or early 2000s, and had come to know a number of senior Israeli officials and Jewish-American leaders. He was able to parlay that into a role conveying messages from one party to another across Arab-Israeli battle lines. His distinguishing feature was that he was relatively discreet. The Qatari Government hired him to help conduct outreach to Jewish leaders and to find out who to talk to and how to get in touch with them. I think most people would agree that there’s value in diplomacy, the ability to talk with others even when you disagree with them, especially if it’s for the purpose of understanding them better. If Margalit or others would like to disparage that as “image-making” and imply that the Qataris were somehow defrauding the American public, then I don’t know what to say. The point is that it was only later that Jay got involved with Perception (the media consultancy owned by Urich and Einhorn) which was not part of the original Qatari contract and it’s true that he ended up biting off more than he could chew. And even then, the Qataris were told by the Israeli Prime Minister's Office that all of this PR activity had official approval as long as the people on payroll were not government employees and that the individuals who were on contract had recently left their government jobs.
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The words "The Qatari Embassy in Israel" projected onto Likud headquarters in Tel Aviv—a visual protest against Netanyahu's long-standing, state-sanctioned backchannel dealings with Doha.It’s not that Qatar needed some sort of image makeover. It’s never been a secret that Al Jazeera rails against Israel, cherry-picking oddballs from the obscure Neturei Karta sect (an off-shoot of the Satmar Chassidim) and platforming them as though they were somehow representative of more than just an Arab fantasy of what Judaism should be. There may not be a fully functioning synagogue in Doha with a Rabbi holding public events and shipping in kosher food for backpacking Israelis on Passover but Jews have lived and worked in Qatar for decades now. Most of them are European and secular, though they pull together a minyan from time to time.
Political commentators can accuse Qatar all they like about funding US campus protests against Israel in 2023/24 but by and large most of the protests weren’t taking place on Qatari-affiliated campuses. For example, George Washington University, the anti-Zionist pot-smoking retro-hippie shambles of a tent city that served as a hub for activity in DC is heavily funded by the Saudis and Kuwait. Regardless, it’s the year 2026 now and there’s not much that hasn’t been said about Qatar. Nobody is going to makeover anyone’s image at this point.
There is a lot of competition for influence that goes on behind the scenes in Washington and other Western capitals among the various Arab Gulf states. But the highpoint of Gulf sniping and image-making in Washington has passed. Nobody is renting out a Smithsonian museum on the Mall, lining up a dozen US military flag officers on stage and declaring that their small Gulf country will be the true standard-bearers of the American Dream. Not the way they once did, at any rate. And any claims of scurrilous Gulfie behaviour need to demonstrate exactly how those funds and activities have contributed to changing public opinion or policy, which is something that most commentators carefully gloss over.
Qatari funding for Gaza had been in place for well over a decade before October 7th happened – always with the approval and oversight of the Israeli military and intelligence services. The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) appreciated it, as did Shin Bet and Mossad. Israeli officials used the back-channel to pass messages to Hamas for de-escalating tensions and the meetings with Qatari officials gave the Israelis critical information about the state of affairs in Gaza. All of this went back to the late 2000s, a time when Qatar was legitimately mediating conflicts around the world, usually at the request of Western states, and always using economic incentives to bring warring parties to the negotiating table. In those days, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani had a vision for Gaza of high-rise developments and luxury shopping (to be called “Hamadtown”), very much like Jared Kushner’s recent proposal for a Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation (GREAT) trust. It never got off the ground, because the Israelis wouldn’t allow construction materials to be imported into Gaza where Hamas would use them to build tunnels and weapons.
It took a long time to work out the arrangements that led to the civil service salary payments, with the Israelis and Qataris closely coordinating on every dollar spent. Guy Samuel’s blog at The Times of Israel far more accurately details how there was broad support for this within Israeli Government circles, across multiple cabinets. Qatar also put money into civic works projects in Arab villages inside Israel. Again, that was something the Israeli Government valued as a way to help reduce crime while avoiding budgetary pressures on Israeli Government finances. Honestly, how many Jewish Israelis do you think want their tax dollars going toward civic works for reducing crime in Arab Israeli villages? It was never as so many journalists have later implied – that the Qataris supporting Arab Israeli projects was a front designed to surreptitiously smuggle money into Gaza for nefarious purposes.
Footlik, Einhorn, Feldstein and Urich didn’t invent a lot of fake news about Qatar and spoon feed it to the gullible masses on social media. All of these things were real to a greater or lesser extent. Hamas boss Khaled Mashal really did flee Damascus and take up residence in Doha after the start of the Syrian Civil War at the request of the United States. He wanted to bring the whole Hamas office in Damascus with him, all hundred or so colleagues. Again, in consultation with the Americans, the Qataris told Mashal he could only bring half a dozen associates and the rest would have to go elsewhere. No written record of the request was circulated, which is a shame, because when the Gulf Rift began (the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt launched a land, air and sea blockade of Qatar in 2017 which ended four years later) a lot of people wanted to see proof that the consultation had taken place. At the time when it happened, I had spoken with three officials on both sides who confirmed it, though I have nothing in writing either.
By the way, PA President Mahmoud Abbas also had residency in Doha throughout this period for his family. Is there anything nefarious about that? In the 1960s, Abbas served as a senior civil servant in Doha under British Mandate rule, helping to recruit labour for the nascent Qatari Government.
So, sure, there’s a lot of animus against Qatar in Israel. Throughout the period the hostages were being held in Gaza, however, there was also a lot of support, at least among the hostage families. Unlike Netanyahu, the Qataris took the time to meet with them, listen to their concerns, keep them informed as best as possible and most of that was done quietly without any fanfare or publicity. A lot of the hostage families appreciated it, especially when Netanyahu’s allies were attacking them for supposedly undermining the war effort. Meetings between Qatari officials and hostage families, in the region and in Washington, didn’t even need lobbyists or consultants to organise. There were a lot of people who simply saw the value in it and thought it was the right thing to do, so they volunteered their time.
Anyway, what we learn from The New Yorker article is that apparently Footlik, Einhorn, Feldstein and Urich had deluded themselves into thinking they were creating these narratives out of thin air. Brilliant. A lot of journalists would have us believe that where there’s smoke there’s fire. It’s all part of some grand double and triple-crossing scheme that Netanyahu concocted to prop up Hamas with Qatari support to keep himself in power. Or some such thing.
Perhaps it’s simpler than that. Maybe all this influence-peddling wasn’t really all that influential. Footlik, Einhorn, Feldstein and Urich may have been very proud of themselves. But step back from their preening and all these press statements and social media hits really didn’t say much that hadn’t already been said or change any minds that hadn’t already been changed. Because that’s the nature of a lot of influence campaigns – they often have more impact among the foreign donors and PR companies than the actual target audience. And after it’s gone, all we’re left with is a haze of vague accusations about the “famous Qatari duality” and “lulling empowerment” that presents Qatar as a two faced Janus while conveniently steering focus away from Netanyahu’s culpability and egregious failures including clear and unambiguous warnings from both the Emiratis and the Egyptians that the October 7th Hamas attack was imminent.
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