Security footage captures the moment of an Israeli strike targeting Hamas leaders in Doha, Qatar. Photo / Getty Images
Arab leaders across the Middle East are questioning the value of American security guarantees in the wake of Israel’s unprecedented assault on Qatar - a major United States ally and home to Washington’s biggest military base in the region.
Other US allies including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain condemned the attack.
None are expected to react militarily or through trade sanctions against Israel, but it could accelerate Arab efforts to diversify their alliances by forging stronger economic, political and even military ties with other global powers, according to experts.
“If you are an Arab country that hosts US bases, or a Nato member like Turkey, and then a major US ally attacks Qatar, you are going to deeply question that American security umbrella you’ve paid top dollar for,” said Ellie Geranmayeh, deputy programme director for Middle East and North Africa at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
The attack also undermined one of US President Donald Trump’s key foreign policy objectives: weakening Iran and promoting greater integration between Israel and Arab states.
Instead, countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar could work to further normalise ties with Tehran - rejecting what they see as an increasingly hegemonic Israel, whose aggressive military posture they believe will destabilise the region.
“A strong Iran that threatened Gulf states pushed some of them towards Israel,” said Mustafa Fahs, a Beirut-based commentator.
“Now, an Israel that seems to be out of control is making them step back and even deepen rapprochement with Iran.”
The UAE was caught off guard by the attack on Qatar and believes Israel is increasingly following in Iran’s footsteps by becoming a threat to the region’s stability, according to an official from the country.
Abdulaziz Al-Anjeri, founder and head of Kuwait-based Reconnaissance Research, said the irony was that “Israel carried out the very strike it once warned the GCC would face from Iran - turning its own warning into action,” referring to the six-member Gulf Co-operation Council.
He said the attack will bring the realisation that “the US security umbrella is no longer full coverage - it leaves out protection from Israel, and that cannot be undone”.
Still, Robert Satloff, executive director at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the fact that Gulf nations have only reacted rhetorically may signal the attack is “viewed as a one-off event driven by the unique circumstances, rather than a seismic shift”.
Middle East states have watched Israel strike regional capitals like Beirut, Damascus, Sana’a and Tehran since the start of the war in Gaza almost two years ago.
There have been brazen Israeli operations in the past in the heart of Arab cities: the 2010 assassination of a Hamas military leader in a Dubai hotel room and the 1985 airstrike on the Palestine Liberation Organisation headquarters in the Tunisian capital that killed nearly 70 people.
But the strike in Doha, a prosperous financial centre home to one of the world’s biggest sovereign wealth funds, is different - and is echoing around the gilded halls of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.
“The flames have reached them directly, this is no longer in the periphery,” said Oraib Al-Rantawi, director of the Al-Quds Centre for Political Studies in the Jordanian capital Amman.
Gulf countries now understand that Israel can hit any of its perceived enemies in the region and that the entire Middle East is a potential field for its war, according to a European diplomat in the Gulf.
During a press conference in Doha after the attack, Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, visibly upset and tapping his fingers on the podium, sounded the alarm to fellow Gulf leaders.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “himself said he will redraw the Middle East.”Is the message that he wants to redraw the Gulf region too?”
Sheikh Mohammed said the US only informed his country about the attack 10 minutes after it occurred. Qatar was one of three Gulf states Trump visited earlier this year, with Doha receiving him with pomp and pageantry, gifting him a presidential jet and pledging to invest US$500 billion in the US.
Yesterday, Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani welcomed to Doha UAE President Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, who was accompanied by more than a dozen senior Emirati military and security officials.
The UAE is the highest-profile signatory to the Trump-brokered Abraham Accords that normalised ties between Israel and a small group of Arab countries in 2020.
The attack on Wednesday will be seen as “crossing a red line” for the entire Gulf, given Qatar is a member of the GCC, which at its core has a collective security element, said Hasan Alhasan, senior fellow for Middle East policy at the Bahrain-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“Israel has now proved itself as a direct threat to the Arab Gulf security, and those countries are not equipped to handle this,” he said.
“The attack on Qatar should trigger a rethinking of how GCC nations view their relationship with the US.”
Moving closer to Moscow or Beijing would irk the Trump Administration, but Gulf countries could consider nations more palatable to the US - like Turkey, Pakistan, India and Indonesia - or even accelerate their own weapons manufacturing, added Alhasan.
The US has around 40,000 service members in the Middle East, across 19 military facilities including the Al Udeid base in Qatar, the forward headquarters of US Central Command, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
CENTCOM’s area of operation stretches from northeast Africa to Central Asia and encompasses 21 nations including Israel and all Gulf Arab states.
“One assumes, given the structure of Central Command, that deterrence is guaranteed by the US, at least from fellow members of CENTCOM,” said Ali Shihabi, a Saudi author and commentator close to the royal court. “This punctures it all.”
- With assistance from Golnar Motevalli, Fiona MacDonald, Dana Khraiche, Mirette Magdy, Abeer Abu Omar and Julius Domoney.
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