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The Qatar Blockade: How Israel and the UAE Coordinated to Kill Qatar.When the UAE led the charge to isolate Qatar in June 2017, dragging Saudi Arabia and Bahrain along for the ride, the public story was about terrorism financing and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Qatar, we were told, had gone rogue. Close Al Jazeera, expel the Turks, cut ties with Iran, get back in line. A Gulf family dispute that needed sorting out.
It wasn’t. Leaked emails from UAE Ambassador Yousef Al-Otaiba’s inbox tell a different story: a carefully coordinated UAE-Israeli operation to crush a Gulf state that refused normalisation with Tel Aviv and maintained an independent foreign policy. In exchanges with Elliott Abrams and Dennis Ross, both stalwart Israel advocates, Al-Otaiba discussed punishing Qatar for supporting the BDS movement against Israel.
At one point, Abrams floated the idea that conquering Qatar would “solve everyone’s problems literally.” Al-Otaiba’s response? It would be “an easy lift.”
They meant it. Former German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel later confirmed that the UAE and its partners had drawn up invasion plans for June 2017. What stopped them wasn’t Trump’s diplomatic brilliance. It was Rex Tillerson, working the phones frantically after Qatari intelligence tipped him off, conducting over 20 calls to prevent a military assault on a country hosting America’s largest Middle East air base. The UAE had positioned Saudi Arabia as the public face of the operation, but Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv were calling the shots.
Tillerson’s problem was his own president. On the same day Tillerson urged calm, Trump publicly called Qatar a terrorism funder and praised the blockade. This wasn’t an accident. Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon had sat down with Saudi and UAE leaders in May 2017 to discuss the operation, a meeting deliberately kept from Tillerson. When the blockade launched, the administration split: Tillerson defending Qatari sovereignty, Trump and Kushner backing the UAE’s play with Saudi Arabia as the convenient front.
The Israeli hand wasn’t hidden for long. During the crisis, Israeli and Emirati lobbyists worked Congress in tandem, pushing legislation to designate Qatar a state sponsor of terrorism. The UAE coordinated with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a neoconservative shop funded by Sheldon Adelson, one of Netanyahu’s biggest patrons. Netanyahu himself attended meetings with UAE and Bahraini ambassadors during the crisis, making Israel’s direct involvement unmistakable. This was the UAE-Israel axis in action, with Saudi Arabia providing regional Muslim cover for what was fundamentally an operation serving Israeli strategic interests.
Qatar survived because it had what the UAE and Israel hadn’t counted on: allies willing to absorb real costs. Iran opened its airspace immediately and established supply routes. Turkey deployed troops and cargo ships within days. What Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv designed as swift strangulation became a years-long stalemate that ended in quiet failure. Qatar called the bluff and won.
The 2017 blockade wasn’t about terrorism or the Brotherhood. It was the UAE doing Israel’s work, trying to force a small Gulf state into a regional order that prioritized normalization with Tel Aviv and confrontation with Tehran above all else. Saudi Arabia came along, whether as willing partner or useful cover. The operation failed, but it exposed how completely UAE foreign policy had aligned with Israeli objectives, three years before the Abraham Accords made it official.
(credit: Frame the Globe News)
