by Jonathan S. Tobin
The foreign-policy establishment’s outrage about the strike on Hamas leaders is sheer hypocrisy. What needs to change is Washington’s reliance on the Islamists in Doha.
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| Protesters associated with Pakistan's Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) Party in Islamabad hold a banner against Israel's airstrikes targeting Hamas leaders in Qatar, Sept. 10, 2025. Photo by Farooq Naeem/AFP via Getty Images. |
The anger from the international community, as well as the Muslim and Arab world, about Israel’s airstrike on members of the Hamas leadership in Doha, Qatar, was matched only by the outrage coming from the American foreign-policy establishment. At the heart of their complaints was not just their chagrin at the skill of the Israel Defense Forces and the Jewish state’s intelligence operatives, in addition to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s willingness to flout world opinion.
They were also at pains to depict the strike as the actions of a rogue state, which exploits its ties with the United States rather than behaves like a good ally.
The narrative about the incident is the claim that Netanyahu tricked and/or betrayed President Donald Trump about the airstrike, and so, we were told, he was left with egg on his face.
The most important fact about what happened in Doha was something conspicuously ignored in almost all media coverage. The real scandal was that the men who direct Hamas operations and represent it to the world have been allowed to live openly in peace and apparent security in the Gulf state.
No different than bin Laden
Amid all the huffing and puffing about Israel’s chutzpah for violating the sovereignty of the Gulf emirate, what was lost was that the Hamas operatives and their various functionaries, bodyguards and family members put in harm’s way by the Israelis are among the most vicious criminals on the planet—the moral equivalent of Al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden.
The real issue isn’t Israel’s violating international norms by attempting to administer the same summary justice to the people who were as much the architects of the terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, as bin Laden was of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It’s that a country America continues to treat as a trusted ally is playing host to the authors of the worst mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. That country also funds Islamist terror and supports Islamist indoctrination around the world while acting as a key supporter of Iran. It’s the Qataris who are the rogue state, not the Israelis.
Once that information is acknowledged, then the question is not what the Israelis were doing to disturb the peace of a wealthy enclave in Doha. The question is why the Trump administration seems to be following in the footsteps of its hapless predecessors by treating the Qataris as allies rather than, at best, frenemies who should never be trusted. If anyone has been duping Trump, it’s the Qataris, not the Israelis. Anyone reading or watching news accounts of the attack missed all of this.
Headlines in the liberal mainstream media outlets all screamed their dismay at the Jewish state’s decision to take out some of the terrorist group’s leaders in what they thought was the safe haven of an exclusive neighborhood filled with embassies and luxury residential buildings.
CNN led with a quote from Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani calling the attack “state terrorism.” A Washington Post story focused on the allegation that Jerusalem was acting like a rogue state: “Israel says it’s bombing its way to peace. The region fears more chaos.”
The New York Times headline on its story betrayed a somewhat more subtle agenda: “Once Again, Israel Leaves Trump in the Dark as It Conducts a Military Attack.” The goal was to highlight not just an apparent rift between Israel and the United States over the incident. The point was to drive home the more sinister notion that Netanyahu is deceiving his erstwhile strategic partner, as well as leading the U.S. president around by the nose and undermining American interests to advance his own dark goals of military conquest and unending war.
A day later, the Times followed up with an even more tendentious story advocating for the Gulf States to take action against Israel while claiming that the attack threatened Qatar’s ability to conduct international trade. But what does granting mass murderers safe haven have to do with the ability of the Gulf emirates to engage in commerce?
In doing so, such media were voicing a sentiment that was repeated throughout the corporate press coverage of the event. The Times and other outlets rounded up the usual suspects of “experts” from Middle East studies departments at major universities—many of which are funded by Qatar—to echo the notion that Israel is the tail wagging the American dog, much to the detriment of the cause of peace and good relations between the United States and the Muslim Arab world.
Veterans of the Obama and Biden administrations who still nurse grudges against Netanyahu and the Israelis for not obeying their orders not to defend their country against terrorists or to make suicidal concessions to them were also trotted out to denounce the strike. They asserted that the Israeli goal was to sabotage ceasefire negotiations with Hamas, for which Qatar serves as the intermediary, as well as to undermine the U.S. relationship with Doha.
More importantly, they sought to play on Trump’s vanity and trumpet the conclusion that the self-styled master of the “art of the deal” was being played for a fool by the Israeli leader.
A false friend
Many in the foreign-policy establishment speak of the relationship with Qatar as a good deal for the United States. The Qataris are said to be doing a huge favor to Washington by allowing it to use the Al Udeid Air Base as the headquarters for the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and a listening post from which the Americans can keep an eye on Iran and other malign actors in the Middle East.
Moreover, the Qataris have also managed to insert themselves into negotiations between Israel, the United States and Hamas, thereby making them indispensable to the diplomatic process by which Washington hopes to broker yet another ceasefire-hostage release deal with the terrorists.
This narrative about the U.S.-Qatari relationship, however, has it all backwards.
Qatar isn’t doing the Americans any favors by posing as the go-between with Hamas. This is, like the hosting of the military airbase, part of the emirate’s information operation in which it has sought to buy influence in the United States and advance the Islamist agenda that it supports.
Hamas’s presence in Qatar is no accident. It is the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group that gave birth to Hamas. The Brotherhood is also one of the principal engines of a jihadist movement whose aim is the destruction of Israel and a war on the West.
Buying influence
The oil-rich emirate spends money like water in America. It is the largest foreign donor to U.S. institutions of higher education, giving some of its wealth to colleges and universities to maintain Middle East studies departments that are bastions of anti-Western hate and antisemitism, as well as apologists for Islamist threats to America.
And it’s also the Washington lobbying industry’s best friend, buying influence in Congress and the business community. As Middle East analyst Michael Pregent told me, there are a lot of lobbyists and other figures in Washington, D.C., who “couldn’t pay their mortgages” without the money they get either directly or indirectly from Qatar. The emirate’s role in bailing out Trump envoy Steve Witkoff in a real estate deal not only casts doubt on his judgment but has essentially compromised the Trump foreign-policy team’s ability to objectively evaluate Doha’s role in the Middle East.
Another small example of Qatar’s profligate spending in the United States is the way it has funded the film career of the mother of Zohran Mamdani, the Socialist who is the Democratic Party’s candidate in the race for mayor of New York City. The tens of millions it has spent propping up the career of arthouse filmmaker and documentarian Mira Nair, Mamdani’s Israel-bashing mother, is small change compared to the reported hundreds of millions it invested in helping Witkoff. But like the money it spends on installing those who hate Israel and America in tenured positions at colleges and universities, it does all add up.
And that’s not even counting the enormous influence it wields via its Al Jazeera news channel—the most-watched media outlet in the Muslim world—that churns out Muslim Brotherhood-style propaganda masquerading as reporting seven days a week.
It’s true that the Al Udeid Air Base is more important than ever to the United States after former President Joe Biden’s shameful abandonment of the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to the Taliban in 2021. While moving it elsewhere would be highly inconvenient, the idea that it couldn’t be transferred to another Gulf emirate isn’t credible. Its presence in Qatar not only confers legitimacy on the dubious notion that Doha is an ally. It also undermines America’s credibility in the struggle against Islamist terror—a point not lost on groups like Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood mentors, who are funded by the Qataris. Though its apologists will never admit it, Qatar needs the United States a lot more than America needs Qatar.
Simply put, Qatar plays both ends against the middle when it comes to America and Islamic terrorists who wish to destroy it. Unlike Pakistan, which often does the same thing while posing as a U.S. ally, Qatar’s ability to maintain this untenable position is based on its buying influence and not a nuclear weapon.
Has the strike in Qatar endangered Israel’s relationship with Trump? That’s what Israel-bashers are counting on. But they shouldn’t.
Even as Trump expressed his displeasure about the Israelis acting independently of his control in this manner, he still expressed views that are more in line with those of the pro-Israel community, saying in a Truth Social post that “eliminating Hamas, who have profited off of the misery of those living in Gaza, is a worthy goal.” That is a far cry from the condemnations of the operation.
Trump went on to note that the strike could help prod the Qataris and Hamas to stop stalling in the negotiations and to bend to his most recent ultimatum to the terrorists, demanding that they accept his terms, which involve the release of all the hostages they are still holding and surrender their arms.
An elaborate grift
That goes back to another basic truth ignored in the hubbub about Israel’s actions: the belief that Hamas—and its Qatari funders and enablers—are in any way reasonable actors or part of a credible diplomatic process is a myth. The negotiations approved by Trump, into which Witkoff has helped mire the United States, are nothing more than an elaborate grift on the part of the Qataris and their clients.
They are no more interested in a peaceful settlement to the war in Gaza today than they were in the aftermath of Oct. 7. What they intend to do is to keep stringing out the talks to allow Hamas to survive the war and emerge as its victor, albeit after destroying the coastal enclave and sacrificing thousands of Palestinian Arab lives on the altar of a century-old war to destroy the State of Israel.
The only way to deal with Hamas is to hunt down every last member of its leadership and cadres, and handle them the same way the United States administered justice to bin Laden and a host of other Al-Qaeda terrorists. Doing so does nothing to undermine the cause of peace or efforts to ransom hostages that Hamas has no intention of releasing.
Netanyahu is right to make it clear—even to a good friend of the Jewish state like Trump—that Israel won’t accept any deal that compromises its security or enables a genocidal group like Hamas to remain in a position to repeat its crimes.
Whether the West realizes it or not, the Qatar strike didn’t just bolster Israel’s security but dealt a blow to the forces that also threaten America and Europe. Qatar is an unreliable ally. Israel is a reliable one. Much as Trump may prefer to believe that Doha’s influence-peddling aligns with his own transactional ideas about alliances, the sooner he wises up to the way the Qataris are playing him on behalf of the Oct. 7 murderers, the more rational America’s Middle East policy will become.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek
and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American
political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle
East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think
Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin
Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and
YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor
and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger.
He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other
writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and
foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia
University.
Source: https://www.jns.org/americas-unreliable-middle-east-ally-is-qatar-not-israel/
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