Hussein Aboubakr Mansour
Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, Feb. 19, 2025
“Al Jazeera’s Arabic channel regularly lambasts the region’s monarchies and strongmen for failing to support the Palestinians, all while the Qatari monarchy itself cultivates cordial ties with Western powers like the United States, having thousands of American technocrats and professors on its generous payroll.”
For years and long before October 7, 2023, Gaza has languished as one of the most troubled enclaves on Earth: a strip of land mired in poverty, controlled by Hamas, and functioning as both a human shield and propaganda tool for regional powers. After the October 7th massacre and its aftermath, Gaza was reduced to little more than rubble with no country willing to help end the crisis.
Now, President Donald Trump has announced a bold—some would say quixotic—plan to “take over” Gaza, turn it into a glittering American Riviera of the Middle East, and provide alternate homes for Gazans in Egypt and Jordan. The move, at face value, has the potential to shake the region’s stagnation: it might push Arab states to either step up with a realistic solution or cede control to a U.S.-led effort at reconstruction and modernization.
Yet one glaring obstacle stands in the way: Qatar. If Trump genuinely expects Arab leaders to help solve, or at least allow him to solve, the Gaza crisis, he must also pressure Qatar to rein in its powerful propaganda networks and their ongoing alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood. These networks, notably Al-Jazeera, have long used the Gaza crisis as a cudgel to hammer other Arab regimes, portraying them as complicit in Israel’s “siege” or indifferent to Palestinian suffering. In so doing, they undermine rival governments that are already wary of a backlash from their own citizens and the broader Arab street. … SOURCE