Donald Trump’s recent visit to the Middle East has thrown a spotlight onto Qatar, an oil-rich emirate that punches above its weight in the geopolitical arena. While Qatar might be seen as a Western ally, especially given that it is home to the largest US military base in the entire region, it also moonlights as a chief financial sponsor and diplomatic patron of Hamas, the Islamist terror group responsible for the 7 October 2023 pogrom in southern Israel.

For more than two decades, the Qatari government, led by the Al-Thani monarchy, has provided billions in financial backing to Hamas. It has also thrown its diplomatic weight behind the terrorist group and provided luxury accommodation in the Qatari capital of Doha for Hamas leaders like Khaled Meshal, Ismail Haniyeh, and Moussa Abu Marzouk. It’s baffling—Qatar promotes itself as a modern, technological, even futuristic place, and yet it backs a mediaeval jihadist movement whose leaders have led the people of Gaza to utter ruin.

Hamas’s other main backers—chiefly the Islamic Republic of Iran, and to a lesser extent the autocratic regimes in China, Russia, and Turkey—deserve their own share of scrutiny. But Qatar’s case is unique.

During his first presidency, Donald Trump accused the Qatari leadership of funding terrorism at a “very high level” and called on them to change course. Yet on this latest trip, Trump has praised Qatar’s leadership and accepted a flurry of gifts from them including a US$400 million private jet, which is set to become the new Air Force One, as part of a broader deal that will involve more than US$243 billion worth of Qatari investment in America. Even for Trump, who is hardly known for his consistency, this is a staggeringly acrobatic flip turn. 

Qatar has poured more than a billion dollars into Gaza under Hamas rule, which began after the terrorist group seized power in a violent 2007 coup. This support is consistent with Qatar’s broader ideological alignment with the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organisation of which Hamas is the Palestinian branch. The Qatari monarchy has cultivated ties with many Brotherhood-linked groups active across the region, including Egypt’s short-lived Morsi administration (2012–13), to which Qatar provided billions in aid. Qatar has also extended support to the Ennahda in Tunisia, the Islamic Action Front in Jordan, and various Brotherhood-linked factions in Libya and Syria.

This is part of a multi-pronged approach. Al Jazeera’s Arabic channel, which is the leading Middle Eastern news platform, is tightly controlled by the Qatari government and directly operated by the members of the ruling family. The widely viewed channel offers favourable coverage of Hamas officials and has aired many uncritical interviews with Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Meshal. On the day of the 7 October attacks, Al Jazeera broadcast a propaganda statement by Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif. The channel portrays Hamas militants as freedom fighters and refrains from calling their actions terrorism. Many Al Jazeera guests have defended Hamas’s actions and ideology.

And these propaganda efforts are not restricted to the Middle East—far from it. The Qatari government has also attempted to influence public discussion in Western democracies. Qatari organisations have made substantial investments in American universities including Georgetown, Northwestern, Texas A&M, and Cornell, all of which have established satellite campuses in Qatar. Between 2000 and 2021, Qatar donated a mammoth US$4.7 billion to American universities—making it by far the largest foreign funder of US universities over that period.

This restless wrangling for soft power also extends to the funding of think tanks and non-profit organisations. The Brookings Institution, one of the best-funded and most influential policy think tanks in Washington, reportedly received more than US$14 million from the Qatari government between 2013 and 2015 (although their website clearly states that they no longer receive any such funding).

And Qatari influence extends far beyond academia and policy think tanks into the Western media landscape—and not just through the state-funded Al Jazeera network, which operates prominent English-language channels. Using its sovereign wealth fund and the personal purses of royal family members, Qatar has acquired stakes in major media and entertainment companies. It has partial ownership of The Economist (through the members of the Al-Thani family), holds a financial stake in French news outlets such as Le Monde and Libération, and has acquired Miramax Films, a major Hollywood studio.

This dual approach of engaging with the West on one hand, while sponsoring kidnapper-jihadists on the other, is deeply treacherous. Supporting, funding, and sheltering anti-Western jihadists, while claiming to be an American ally and investor in the United States, is a wildly incoherent and unsustainable strategy likely to result in conflict between Qatar and the entire Western world.

Qatar isn’t alone in supporting Hamas. The group’s oldest and most committed patron is the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has supplied money, weapons, training, and rhetorical backing for decades—not only to Hamas but to a cross-section of anti-Israel and anti-American militants including Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. Tehran’s support is more nakedly anti-Western than Doha’s—it uses Hamas to attack Israel and undermine Western influence in the region. Iran’s leaders and proxies regularly talk of “death to America.”

China and Russia are also part of this anti-American axis. Both benefit from a weakened and divided Middle East in which US influence is receding. Tacit support for Hamas and other elements that destabilise the region are an important dimension of their policy.

The Israeli government itself also deserves criticism for coddling Hamas. For years, Benjamin Netanyahu—as he himself has publicly admitted—pursued a deliberate strategy of allowing Hamas to rule Gaza, letting Qatar transfer funds to the terrorist group as a way of weakening the Palestinian Authority and maintaining division within Palestinian politics. Netanyahu feared that a united Palestinian government might have forced progress on negotiations leading to Palestinian statehood; the division between Hamas in Gaza and the PA in the West Bank stalled progress indefinitely. But the effect was to entrench Hamas rule, sideline more moderate Palestinians—whom Hamas violently suppressed, jailed, and tortured—and allow a jihadist militia to consolidate political and military power.

This led to disaster. The events of 7 October 2023 showed how dangerous it is to treat a jihadist movement as a containable threat. This was not a conflict that could be managed, and Hamas were not a group that could be placated—neither by the UN, nor by Israel, nor by Qatar, nor by anyone else. Israelis will soon get a chance to punish Netanyahu for his mistakes in a general election. Unfortunately, Palestinians are unlikely to get a democratic opportunity to punish Hamas for what they have done.

No doubt, the lion’s share of the blame for the mess that we are in belongs with Hamas itself, and with their murderous ideology. The 7 October pogrom and the war in Gaza are manifestations of Hamas’s worldview: their glorification of antisemitism, jihadist revolutionary violence, and Islamic supremacy, and their belief in endless holy war until Israel is destroyed. Hamas are destroyers, not builders. Disastrously for Palestinians, Hamas’s attempt to destroy Israel backfired and resulted in a war that destroyed large parts of Gaza instead. This pattern of conflict simply must not be allowed to continue. We need peace and economic development in the Middle East, not a mediaeval fantasy of conquest via holy war. 

Qatar’s attempts to supplicate Donald Trump with hundreds of billions of dollars of investment into his country may buy its leaders some time. The smartest thing they could do with this time is to completely disassociate themselves from the various jihadist elements they support and commit to long-term peace and coexistence both with the West and within the Middle East. 

In recent years—especially before 7 October—there have been many positive strides forward, including the Abraham Accords, in which Israel and multiple Arab states such as Bahrain, the UAE, and Sudan committed to peace, coexistence, and mutual recognition. Qatar should sign up to the Abraham Accords. They should support those Palestinians who reject the sick dogma of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and wish to coexist peacefully alongside Israel. They should use Al-Jazeera to promote peace, instead of jihad.

It may seem as if the Qatari leadership, ensconced in their shining city, have no skin in the game, and are able to support jihadist groups without suffering the consequences of their actions. But those who wish to sponsor Hamas or other jihadist groups, and thereby make peace impossible, should not be treated as Western allies. They should not be able to influence Western educational institutions. They should not own large parts of Western economies. They should not be allowed to do business with any Western country. Jihadists are just as anti-Western as they are anti-Israel.

If the leaders in Qatar share the same ideology as Hamas, then sooner or later Qatar will be cast adrift, and they will find themselves marooned. This ideology is a sickness and a poison, a chaotic evil, rotting everything that it touches.

Jihadism Is the Problem

The media’s obsessive focus on the Israel–Palestine conflict obscures the broader picture of the ubiquity of jihadism in the Middle East, and the crucial role it plays in stoking and perpetuating turmoil and strife.

QuilletteJohn Aziz

I hope that the Trump administration will understand this. Trump now has an opportunity to influence the Qatari monarchy away from supporting jihadists and towards promoting peace, coexistence, and economic development for Jews, Christians, Muslims, and all the people of the Middle East. After all the horrific wars that have engulfed the region over the past century, there is now a real chance for us to put our differences aside and to build a new and better reality.

Indeed, peace in the Middle East would benefit the entire world. The US and its allies have wasted trillions of dollars on endless wars and occupations, fighting jihadist elements like al-Qaeda and the Taliban. This has been a strategic disaster for the US, which was precisely Osama bin Laden’s goal when he attacked America on 11 September 2001—he wanted to bog the United States down in an expensive and deadly quagmire.

It's time we put pressure on Qatar to stop funding jihadism. It’s time we started working towards real, sustainable peace in the Middle East.