Politics aside, I can't help but feel there are significant 'commercial' motives at play here in an airline context.
QR dumps significant capacity into the UAE with DXB alone being its biggest destination in terms of the number of seats available and the target audience is the traveller originating or ending their journey in Dubai. When you add up the capacity going to and from AUH, DWC, SHJ and RKT, then you have a massive operation that is targeting travellers right in the back yard of the UAE operators. As an aside, QR were in the process of adding their ninth and tenth destination in the Kingdom.
From friends outside of the industry, they consistently tell me that QR seems to always beat EK on price and often by a significant margin from DXB and most seem to favour the QR product as well. Perhaps it is little wonder that we are seeing such strict flying restrictions in such challenging times for the industry as a whole and especially so for EK.