Dr. Majed Muhammad Al-Ansari, the spokesman of Qatar's Foreign Ministry and an adviser to the Qatari prime minister, was until quite recently a journalist and a columnist for the Qatari state daily Al-Sharq. Echoing Qatar's policy of supporting Hamas both politically and economically, Al-Ansari has expressed total support for armed struggle against Israel and for massive rocket attacks on it. One example of this is a column he published in Al-Sharq on May 24, 2021, just a few days after the end of the round of fighting between Israel and Hamas that began on May 10, 2021,[1] during which Hamas and other armed Palestinian factions fired thousands of rockets into Israel. In his article Al-Ansari praised Hamas' "victory" over Israel, which he called "the Zionist enemy" or "the entity," and celebrated the "the launching of 3,000 rockets in 10 days" into Israeli cities, which he said placed "the entire entity under the threat of the Palestinian rockets." This round of fighting, he stated, was just "one battle in an ongoing conflict." But it nevertheless marked "the beginning of the victory," because "historical victories" are the result of decades of ongoing activity. As examples of this he mentioned the First Intifada, which he said eventually led to the Israeli withdrawals as part of the Oslo Accords; the "martyrdom operations" during the Al-Aqsa Intifada; the "organized guerilla warfare" that, according to him, led to the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza – "the first Palestinian territory to be liberated from the occupier" – and the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel. Al-Ansari asserted that the struggle against Israel continues to develop towards the ultimate goal of "the disappearance of the occupation," and expressed hope that Allah would allow him to live long enough to see the Muslim victory and "the liberation of Al-Aqsa Mosque and all the blessed land."
Dr. Majed Mohammed Al-Ansari, spokesman of the Qatari Foreign Ministry (Image: Qna.org.qa, February 2, 2024)
The following are translated excerpts from Al-Ansari's 2021 article: [2]
"…What happened in the latest confrontation with the Zionist enemy [the May 2021 round of fighting between Hamas and Israel] was ultimately the result of [just] one battle in an ongoing conflict. This is a fact we should all keep in mind when we come to assess the changes in [Palestinian] issue every year – because historical victories are not realized suddenly. They are a result of years and decades of activity aimed at dismantling weakness and its causes and building and reinforcing strength. The important point is the approach [we take] to the confrontation. An optimistic [approach] today does not mean that this battle is the end of the conflict, but that it is the beginning of the victory. It nudged the confrontation in the direction of strengthening those who are in the right [i.e. the Palestinians] and halting the slide toward defeat.
"When we were young, we saw the children of the stones setting forth bare-chested, armed with stones and with keffiyehs hiding their faces, and the [First] Intifada began. The result was that the entity [Israel] hastened to douse the embers [of the Intifada] by means of the Oslo Accords. The flags of Palestine were raised, and the flags of the entity in the West Bank and in Gaza were removed for the first time since the occupation began.
"Several years later, as our awareness regarding the [Palestinian] cause developed, the Al-Aqsa Intifada broke out with martyrdom operations and with its blood-soaked confrontations. The methods of struggle evolved into organized guerilla warfare, in which the enemy sustained many losses, and one of the results was [Israel's] unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, which was the first Palestinian territory to be liberated from the occupier.
"Then came the Gaza war of 2008, and rockets began to be launched from Gaza into the entity's cities. Israel's military losses were heavy, but the greatest damage was to a large part of Tel Aviv's narrative in the West, which had presented [Israel] as the injured party, [and which collapsed] after pictures of [Israel's] arbitrary aggression spread throughout the world.
"In the latest battle [i.e. the Israel-Hamas round of fighting in 2021] the entity was entirely under the threat of the Palestinian missiles. Even the interior [the Arab citizens of Israel] joined the confrontation against the occupier, and the international arenas were set ablaze with discourse against the aggression, adopting the narrative that described the Tel Aviv regime as an apartheid regime. The entity was in a state of great political embarrassment, and was forced to end its aggression with no compromise on the part of the Palestinians.
"The victory celebration in this latest battle is a celebration of continued progress toward victory in the struggle, since there is a great difference between resistance with stones and bare chests and resistance in which 3,000 missiles are launched into the entity's cities in 10 days. The gradual change toward balance [between Israel and the Palestinians] continues, and the wheel of history continues to turn toward the disappearance of the occupation and the restoration of the right to its owners [the Palestinians]. Today the occupier cannot even achieve political stability, and its media channels are full of pundits expressing doubt regarding the regime's capabilities and blaming it for the failure.
"Conversely, the plans to silence the resistance and dissolve the [Palestinian] cause have not managed to achieve their goals, and the entire [Islamic] nation, with all its [different] peoples, has once again become a beating heart supporting Jerusalem and Palestine. I have no doubt that the outcome will [ultimately] favor the people with the rights, since the divine promise is not open to interpretation. All we ask from Allah is that we live to see the era of this victory and receive part of the reward for the liberation of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and all the blessed land."
