Why Saudi Arabia Supported Israel in the Gaza Crisis While Qatar and Turkey

Supported Hamas

Iakovos Alhadeff

It is a well know fact that Saudi Arabia is extremely rich in oil, Qatar is extremely rich in natural gas, and Turkey is not very rich in none of them. Israel has some natural gas riches, nothing in comparison to Qatar, but very poor in oil. It is a well known fact, that Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, all supported the rebels against Assad. However everybody agrees that they funded different rebel groups, since the Saudis are against the Muslim Brotherhood unlike the other two.

Even though they all three were united against Assad, in the Gaza crisis of July 2014, Saudi Arabia blamed Hamas for the crisis, while Turkey and Qatar supported Hamas and blamed Israel. Why unlike the case with Assad they were divided?

The reason is that Assad agreed with Iran, which is rich in both oil and natural gas, to an Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline(red line), that would bring Iranian oil and natural gas to the Mediterranean Sea, thus hurting both oil rich Saudis, natural gas rich Qataris, and bypassing the poor in both Turkey, which wishes however to be the only energy hub in Southern Europe.

Therefore all three were united. In the case of Israel however, the Saudis did not want to support Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’ s offspring, since they are afraid that they are dangerous for their regime too. Since Israel does not have oil to export and hurt the Saudi sales, they supported Israel, because they thought it would be convenient for them to form a short term alliance with Israel, in order for Israel to finish the Muslim Brotherhood’s offspring i.e. Hamas. However the natural gas rich Qatar, and the bypassed as an energy hub by Israel’s exports’ (blue line) Turkey, did not afford to support Israel. Actually it is these two, with some support from Iran that required Hamas to fire the rockets.

The Qataris are hoping to sell their natural gas to Europe through Turkey (black line)