Yesterday’s newsletter mentioned the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the Osama bin Laden deputy now expected to face capital charges for his role in planning the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The aborted plea deal he made with the U.S. military court system led to the publication of various documents that shed light on his relationship with Qatar, the American ally that funds and houses Hamas and controls Al Jazeera. Yigal Carmon writes:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was actively involved in terrorist activities and planning while residing in Qatar during the mid-1990s. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, he moved to Qatar at the request of a patron in the Qatari government, Abdul Rahman Yasin. In Qatar, KSM worked for the Ministry of Electricity and Water. Despite his government employment, he continued to engage in activities related to terrorist networks, leveraging his position to facilitate his operations.

KSM’s connections in Qatar were crucial for his operational security. These relationships provided him with a degree of protection that made it difficult for U.S. authorities to apprehend him during their investigations into his terrorist activities. His patron in Qatar, whose identity and exact motivations remain a matter of sensitivity, appears to have played a key role in providing KSM the necessary cover to plan and coordinate terrorist activities, including early planning stages of what would become the 9/11 attacks.

When the FBI came to Doha in 1996 to arrest KSM, the only ones reportedly to be informed of this, in confidentiality, were the Qatari emir and the palace. Within hours, KSM had disappeared.

While revisiting al-Qaeda, it’s worth also nothing that Wednesday was the anniversary of the terrorist group’s simultaneous bombing of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1996, which killed 224 people and injured more than 4,000. And as, Matthew Levitt wrote in 2011, there was another country beside Qatar providing support to al-Qaeda, as a U.S. district court concluded:

In a 45-page opinion, Judge John D. Bates ruled that Iran “provided material aid and support to al-Qaeda for the 1998 embassy bombings” in East Africa. The Washington court also found that “the Iranian defendants, through Hizballah, provided explosives training to bin Laden and al-Qaeda and rendered direct assistance to al-Qaeda operatives.” Hizballah is the Lebanese party and militia long allied with Iran.

With the IDF engaged in ground maneuvers in both northern and southern Gaza, and a plan about to go into effect next week that would separate more than 100,000 civilians from Hamas’s control, an end to the war may at last be in sight. Yet there seems to be no agreement within Israel, or without, about what should become of the territory. Efraim Inbar assesses the various proposals, from Donald Trump’s plan to remove the population entirely, to the Israeli far-right’s desire to settle the Strip with Jews, to the internationally supported proposal to place Gaza under the control of the Palestinian Authority (PA)—and exposes the fatal flaws of each. He therefore tries to reframe the problem:

[M]any Arab states have failed to establish a monopoly on the use of force within their borders. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Sudan all suffer from civil wars or armed militias that do not obey the central government.

Perhaps Israel needs to get used to the idea that in the absence of an entity willing to take Gaza under its wing, chaos will prevail there. This is less terrible than people may think. Chaos would allow Israel to establish buffer zones along the Gaza border without interference. Any entity controlling Gaza would oppose such measures and would resist necessary Israeli measures to reduce terrorism. Chaos may also encourage emigration.

Israel is doomed to live with bad neighbors for the foreseeable future. There is no way to ensure zero terrorism. Israel should avoid adopting a policy of containment and should constantly “mow the grass” to minimize the chances of a major threat emerging across the border. Periodic conflicts may be necessary. If the Jews want a state in their homeland, they need to internalize that Israel will have to live by the sword for many more years.