Ask Haviv Anything - 137: What does Qatar want?

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

To support our work, please consider joining our Patreon community (https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything ), Substack (https://havivgur.substack.com/ ), or Buy Me a Coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur ).And be sure to check us out on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/haviv.rettig.gur/ ) and TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@haviv.rettig.gur ).--Welcome to our new short-form episodes interspersed with the regular interviews and lectures that dive into an often-asked question about Israel, Jews and the Middle East.In our current episode we ask: What does Qatar want?If you appreciate what we do here, please consider joining our Patreon community at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything or our Substack at https://havivgur.substack.com/. You can also Buy Me a Coffee at https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur. It helps us keep the lights on. Patreon and Substack are also the platforms where you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Moving on to another subscriber question, what role has Qatar had in this conflict? What influence has it had over the conflict and over the global perception of Israel? Absolutely fascinating. If you understand Qatar's role, you understand a lot, actually, about the, we'll call it the geopolitical mechanics of the Middle East. The role that ideas have, the way that Islamism has served as a really powerful tool of foreign policy for Saudis, Qataris and many, many others. And the way that these different ideologies sort of cross boundaries, cross elites, cross countries, and hold on to each other and build out these axes, these webs of influence and support, we're going to talk about the Muslim Brotherhood, essentially, and how that has produced in Qatar a vision of the

conflict, a vision of the region, a role in the conflict, where it is both the major supporter of Hamas and also the great mediator. It has saved Israeli lives. It has been the platform for negotiating the release of Israeli hostages from the hands of Hamas. Katar has arguably done far more harm to Palestinians than it has to Israel. You know, it has been the great patron of Hamas in Gaza. At the same time, it is explicitly dedicated for reasons as much of ideology, theology, theology, Muslim Brotherhood, kind of affiliation. It is dedicated to keeping the Palestinian polity separated into two different camps to keeping Hamas a powerful separate force from the Palestinian authority as a lever of influence of itself. And so Palestinian politics divided between Fatah and Hamas is essentially

the greater Sunni divide between the conservative Sunnis like the Saudis, the Amiradi, is, et cetera, the Egyptian military regime, the Moroccans, and the radical Sunnis, the Muslim Brotherhood Sunnis, like the Qataris, the Turks, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Hamas, which is established in 1987 as a Muslim Brotherhood branch in Gaza. So let's get into it because to understand Qatar's role, you have to understand the whole. And when you really dig deep into Qatar's role, the region comes to be a lot more explicable. The Qatari story that answers this question begins in 1995. In the summer of 1995, June 1995, the crown prince of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, right?

Qatar is a absolute monarchy ruled by the Althani family. The crown prince, Hamad bin Khalifa, overthrows his father in a bloodless coup. His father, Khalifa bin Hamad, the emir of Qatar, is vacationing in Switzerland. And while dad is vacationing in Switzerland, the son, together with the army, carries out a bloodless palace coup. The older emir is then stuck in Switzerland. It will be a few good years before they are reconciled. but now the son is now in control, Hamad bin Khalifa.

Khammad's desire to overthrow his father came out of a deep frustration. He had been advocating for many years that Qatar expand its monetization of its liquefied natural gas reserves, specifically there's something called the North Field, which is this vast, vast gas reserve that is today the source of a huge part of Qatar's money. But the father didn't want to expand too quickly, didn't want to modernize to develop, was willing to have Qatar be like other Gulf states in a position of a kind of subservience to Saudi Arabia that was very comfortable and very calm

and very relaxed. And a family, of course, was very wealthy. The country is tiny but wealthy. And the son wanted to come out from the Saudi shadow to become a wealthy power center of their own. And so the son overthrew the father and initiated a massive expansion of Katar's. Now, Qatar has a tiny population and a tiny territory. And so it didn't, it wasn't going to become a country with an army. The army was not going to be a relevant part of Qatari power. But it had so much wealth. And it decided to use that wealth. Now, in the 90s, the way that a small country with a lot of money projects power in the Muslim world, the Saudi model, essentially at the time, is essentially to become the great patron of an expansionist missionizing

religious movement within Islam that creates power centers, pockets. And if you're influential on the religious movements and the religious movement spreads on its religious message, then you use that power of religion to expand your influence and power that has real geopolitical implications. And Qatar did that with a Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, suppressed in Egypt by the Egyptian state, an organization founded in the 1920s as part of the great debate over Islamic weakness and piety and modernization and how to overcome centuries of Islamic retreat and decline, that Muslim Brotherhood was brought in to Qatar by the new Emir, the sun, to become this engine of Qatari influence.

The emir founds al-Jazeera the year after his coup in 1996. And the concept of Al Jazeera is to be the main vehicle for promoting Qatari interests, obviously, but doing that under the cover of these Islamist voices. The most prominent Muslim Brotherhood voice that Al Jazeera platformed for a generation was the Egyptian cleric Yusuf al-Karadawi. Yusuf al-Karadari was one of the main ideologues and religious thinkers and theologians of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Therefore, he was in danger in Egypt, and he fled Egypt, and Qatar gave him citizenship in 1968. It hosted him, which means, in other words, Qatar was already close to the Muslim brother. The Emir believed in this version of Islam.

So it wasn't entirely cynical act of, you know, power projection. The New Al Jazeera gives Karadawi a weekly, primetime call-in show called Sharia and Life. This show runs for 17 years. This show has ratings of tens of millions of viewers. He's marketed. He's nicknamed as the global mufti. And the whole concept of the show and the whole concept of the platform is to popularize Muslim Brotherhood theology and align it with Qatar's geopolitical needs, geopolitical interests,

including Karadawi's support for the Arab uprisings in 2011, the Arab Spring, which in the West was almost always discussed as a kind of democratic surge, democratic uprising against oppressive tyrannies. But it never was on the ground, except for a couple of tiny places. The vast majority of the Arab Spring was Islamist uprisings against non-religious or officially secular, even if the people themselves are believing Muslims, dictatorships and regimes. And those Islamists didn't want to establish liberal democracies. They wanted to establish theocracies instead of secular nationalist dictators. And that was really the hard and soul and engine of the Arab Spring.

The Arab Spring never sought to bring down, no massive protest, no major rebellion coalesced against a monarchy because all of the Arab monarchies are based, justify themselves, validate themselves on religion, on either direct dissent from the Prophet or some tradition of dissent from some early Caliph. And so there's a religious validation to the monarchs in a way that there isn't to people who justify their rule with more modern vocabulary, the president of Syria, who has elections, fake elections, but nevertheless elections, right? All this modern garb, those are the places where Islamist rebellions were quite successful,

or at least longstanding. Al Jazeera supported the Arab Spring. Qatar supported the Irish. Karadawi supported the Arab Spring, not out of support for democracy, even if it sometimes labeled it that way, but out of support for those. Islamist factions in all those different countries. Karadawi's views disseminated on Al Jazeera as a major act of Qatari state policy were very extreme.

One famous among Jews broadcast in 2009, he gave a long discussion in which he defended the Holocaust. He didn't deny the Holocaust. He said the Holocaust's point and purpose was divine punishment against the Jewish people. Is that an argument that the Holocaust was a good thing? Karadawi was very much a Muslim Brotherhood theologian. This is how Muslim Brotherhood has been talking for many generations, including explicit outright anti-Semitism and deeply radical Islam.

And Karadawi brought that very successfully, helping to radicalize the Arab world and his listeners and to make that a major piece of the Arab discourse. Al Jazeera became a dominant television reality. regimes before Al Jazeera generally controlled the media landscape in their territory after Al Jazeera they no longer could and the people who sat

on Al Jazeera's editorial line are the Qataris. And that brings us to Hamas and to Qatar's role in the conflict. After Hamas took over Gaza in 2007 very nearly every Arab government disliked it, tried to marginalize it, cut off, you know, didn't have ties with it.

They thought of Hamas is a very dangerous Palestinian schism they also understood that Hamas is a branch of this Muslim Brotherhood access writ large. The Egyptians face this constant Muslim Brotherhood agitation internally for decades, and the Saudis had been de-radicalizing after 9-11 and after the Riyadh bombings in 2003. They were actively de-radicalizing. Hamas was on the other side of that larger religious effort. By the way, Arab states that did seek Palestinian independence

to end the Palestinian issue as an irritant in Arab politics, radicalizer of the Arab street, they wanted a Palestinian state. First of all, obviously, they thought the Israelis weren't allowing a Palestinian state, but one of the major obstacles to that Palestinian state was the schism between Fentach and Hamas in Palestinian politics. And the Hamas takeover in Gaza, of course, created a territorial core to Hamas that deepened that schism. And then Qatar stepped in, and it became Hamas' principal patron alongside Turkey. But Qatar really on the ground much more deeply. In 2012, five years after Hamas's takeover, the Emir, Hamad, our friend from 1995, is the first head of state to visit Hamas ruled Gaza. And in his

visit, he pledges hundreds of millions of dollars, something like $400 million to build roads, to build housing, reconstruction projects. There had been a war. The projects were about helping the civilians. Some of it, a great deal of it was humanitarian. But the point, was to break Hamas' diplomatic isolation, both internationally and also in the Arab world. And that recognition of Hamas as Gaza's government legitimized it. Now, they never literally said, this is the legitimate government, we recognized them. They also didn't want to break the framework of their being a cohesive, unified Palestinian cause and Palestinian representation because they didn't want to give that gift to the Israelis,

who they thought also benefited from that schism. But Qatar wanted to deepen that Palestinian schism, if only to own half the Palestinian story and to be able to advance it on Al Jazeera as part of the narrative-making power it had managed to build over Arab politics, the Arab mind, the Arab street, in which the Palestinians were a huge actor, a huge character in the grand morality plays that the Qataris used to project power through Al Jazeera in the Arab world. So they wanted to be part to have influence over this Palestinian story. And that meant doubling down on supporting Hamas, rescuing Hamas from its belligerency

and the damage that that caused to Gaza over the years and the destabilizing effects it had on the Gaza economy. And that leverage would then mean that they also got to benefit from the power of the Palestinian story in the Arab conversation. Qatar then actually agrees to host Hamas's political leadership, which doesn't live in Gaza. The office was established in 2012. Qatar has claimed that America asked it to open that office that host Hamas leaders because America or other Western governments wanted to have a channel to Hamas.

Having the Qataris be that channel was very useful and having Hamas in Qatar was a very useful way to have that happen. That's how it ended up working. In other words, Hamas was in Qatar. You talked to Hamas by talking to the Qataris, but it also allowed Qatar to protect Hamas' leaders. And it allowed Qatar to grant Hamas' leaders' diplomatic influence, publicity. It meant that they were not completely dependent on Iran.

If Qatar hosts that Hamas leadership in Doha, then it distances Hamas from Iran, makes them less dependent on Iran, and of course, of course, vastly more dependent on Qatar itself. And all the while, that Hamas leadership has direct access to Al Jazeera, where Al Jazeera gives the Hamas line to the Arab world on every issue, every development, everything that happens on the Palestinian front. And incidentally, including the Hamas critique of Fatah and the PA over those years. So the Arab world is hearing Hamas's version of events happening in Palestine in the entirety of the Palestinian polity, far more than it's hearing the Fatah or PA version. of events, and Qatar did that. The core political effect of all of that activity by Qatar is to make the divide between

Hamas and Fatah, between Gaza and Ramallah, permanent, permanent and built in to the geopolitical realities on the ground. Now, Hamas did that. Hamas itself led the violent coup in Gaza in 2007. Qatar made it on a sailor. It provided the money, the economic base in Gaza, for Hamas to rule and be sustained, and by the way, begin to build out that biggest ever tunnel network in the history of war. And it gave it the recognition.

And it gave it access to the most significant media platform in the Arab world, literally. And so Hamas could govern, Hamas could expand, Hamas could build, Hamas could arm, without ever having to look at, pass through, think about the Palestinian authority. The Palestinian Authority as a tax base, the Palestinian Authority has access to international diplomacy. Qatar was the route that allowed it to completely avoid that. So the Palestinian Authority was profoundly weakened by Qatar in that way to expand the Qatari influence over the Palestinian story in order to have more control over the Palestinian story as part of that geopolitical soft power influence over the Arab world generally. And then Qatar made itself useful to Israel.

Qatar's influence its penetration of Gaza in that way was in secret. Israel actively approved of Qatar doing this. People who like to say in defense of Hamas, people who support Hamas will say in defense of Hamas that Netanyahu is the reason that Hamas was allowed to become powerful in Gaza in order to divide the West Bank from Gaza. and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.

This, by the way, is something that Netanyahu, and he had to explain after October 7, why his governments had consistently allowed vast amounts of Qatari money to go to Hamas. His explanation, because he wanted to avoid blame for his explanation was, aha, he borrowed that analysis of the anti-Israel world, and he said, I was just being very clever in preventing the establishment of Palestinian state

by expanding and strengthening the divine, the schism in Palestinian politics and preventing a Palestinian state. But that's not why he did it originally, even if it's what he claims it was. And Netanyahu and the anti-Israel campaign world agree, and both are mistaken or sometimes lying, sometimes just misunderstand. Netanyahu saw Qatar as a solution to the problem of stabilizing Gaza. Netanyahu was a man who came back into power in 2009 after a disastrous collapse of Israeli political life.

In 1987, the first intifada begins. Israel has been ruling Palestinians for 20 years, and suddenly the Israeli left very quickly. Within five years, by 1992, the question of occupation, the question of peace, the question of ending the occupation comes to overwhelm the Israeli. It becomes the new civic religion of the Israeli left that replaces socialism.

In 1999, the Barack government goes to Camp David to negotiate a full Palestinian state with Yazharafat and Bill Clinton, and that crashes disastrously in Israeli political experience, that crashes in the 140 suicide bombings of the Second Intifada. And then the Israeli left is actually basically listless and actually has no story ever since. and then the right takes over. And the right has a problem beginning in 2001 with the Sharon government, which is that it has no answer to the problem either. You can't rule the Palestinians for all time, but also you can't withdraw. And so Sharon begins to develop a right-wing version of the left's idea that we have to separate from the Palestinians,

and that's the unilateral withdrawal. He declares in 2003 that he's going to withdraw from Gaza. He withdraws from Gaza in 2005. And how does that end? Two-thirds of Likud left Likud, voters in the 2006 election that Olmert won. About half of those two-thirds went to Olmert, a man openly talking about a withdrawal from the West Bank. So a right-wing version of the left-wing peace process that was unilateral because you can't trust the other side, but nevertheless we have to separate, is what takes hold in 2006. A few weeks into that government's life, Chamas in Gaza, maybe 10 months after Israel withdrew.

carries out its first tunnel operation, kidnapping Gilad Shalit, killing a couple of Israeli soldiers. There's now an Israeli basically military invasion, a shooting war on the Gaza border, to try and rescue Shalid, among other goals. And in the north, Chesbalah, six years after Israel pulled down in 2000, launches a major cross-border attack, kills Israeli soldiers, kidnaps too. And now Olmer finds himself in the Second Lebanon War. and tens of thousands of rockets fall in Israeli cities, and nothing Olmer does in Lebanon or Gaza stops those rocket volleys. Chazbalah cannot be deterred by anything Israel does in Lebanon.

Hamas cannot be deterred by anything Israel does in Gaza. Ulmer discovers the basic strategic problem that has bedeviled Israel ever since. And the Ulmer government ends that Second Lebanon war with an Israeli public sense that Olmert had failed. And so Olmert is never able to carry out or advance in any meaningful way this plan that he had proposed for a unilateral, unilateral withdrawal from 90% of the West Bank, the convergence plan. Almerz in 2008 tries to do to return to the bilateral process. He places an offer in front of the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. For Olmert, it was a real offer, but Olmert is now already in the throes of corruption investigations.

His government will fall. He will resign in 2009 because of it. He will go to prison for bribery. And Netanyahu comes to power in 2009. And Netanyahu's fundamental promise, his return to power, he had been a prime minister briefly in the 90s, his return to power is covered in the Western press in the New York Times as the return of hardliners back into power after, you know, 15 years of basically failed peace process.

but Netanyahu's actual cell to Israelis on the campaign trail isn't that he's a hardliner, a little bit to his base, but not to most of his voters. Netanyahu's case to Israelis was that all these crazy experiments, the withdrawals, the deals, you know, he's not going to invade anywhere. He tried to avoid war at every turn. He was actually a man committed to doing nothing. Every invasion, the 1982 Lebanon War, every withdrawal, all of them end in river of blood. The goal, Netanyahu basically told Israelis, he called it responsibility. The goal

to be responsible meant to do nothing at all. Freeze everything in place. From 2009, you know, until October 7, basically, Israel's GDP per capita doubled under Netanyahu in that period. And not only did the GDP per capita doubled, not experimenting. Yeah, Palestinians are living under military rule throughout this period, right? This is not helpful to Palestinians. But to Israelis who think they had tried everything and everything collapses in endless bloodshed and endless insanity and massive rocket volleys and the emptying of cities, Israel has no Iron Dome in 2006 when tens of thousands of rockets fall on cities. Buildings are destroyed, hundreds of thousands flee their homes. That trauma is why Israel went to build this

brand new technology that Pentagon assessments were that it's not even possible to do. The Israelis went for it because of the trauma of the second Lebanon War of 2006. Israel spent untold billions building literal bomb shelter rooms in every apartment in the north and in the south that was within range of these short-range missiles. If people visit Israel and go to the southern working class town of Zderot, which is very close to Gaza and was hit by probably hundreds of thousands of Hamas rockets over, you know, since 2000, since the rocket fire from Gaza began in the second Intifada, alongside the massive waves of suicide bombings, you will see literally these old apartment buildings in this working class town where

there's the apartment building and then there is a tower, a room attached to each apartment with an internal door built to the specs of a bomb shelter. That's billions and billions that the Israeli economy has invested since 2006. And so Netanyahu comes to power in 2009 as a man who believes that the only thing that needs to happen is stability. Time is on Israel's side. The gap in economic power, in technological

advance. The Israeli economy under Netanyahu invests more in R&D per capita than any other country on earth. The gap between Israel and its enemies only grows. And that's the goal. When they can give us the peace we need,

when a withdrawal from Gaza doesn't end definitely in a Hamas takeover and list rocket volleys, then people can contemplate peace in the West Bank or a withdrawal from the West Bank. Until then, they can't. That is Netanyahu's cell to Israelis. And so Netanyahu's willingness to have Qatar move into Gaza and fund Hamas and stabilize the Gaza's economy and prevent hunger, make Gaza stable enough to never explode, that Netanyahu policy is literally his one great promise that brought him back to power in 2000. 2009 and kept him in power roughly until the end of the last decade, the late parts of the 2015 government. So roughly 2018, 2019, when Netanyahu becomes more and more reliant for parliamentary reasons on the far right and his own conversation, his own rhetoric changes, and arguably there's a very different policy today in a government where the deciding vote in the coalition in the parliament is held by Ben-Vir and Smoltr, the most right-wing factions. But for that early stage when Netanyo becomes not an ally, he and

Qatar on opposite sides of every Middle Eastern ideological divide that matters, but are willing to cooperate with each other to stabilize Gaza each for their own reason. And Netanyahu's reason is big and significant. And he genuinely believes this is the long-term interest of the state of Israel. And so Qatar becomes this powerful influence in the Palestinian arena with Israeli support. And that's how we see from 2018, Qatar sending $30 million a month from 2018 into Gaza completely coordinated with the Israelis. First, it's cash. It's literal U.S. dollars in cash, you know, I imagine briefcases, but it wasn't. It was actually large bags.

But then it becomes modified because there's a tremendous amount of political blowback that Netanyahu is allowing vast amounts of cash dollars to flow to Hamas from the Qataris. who hate Israel, who are the biggest purveyors of Muslim Brotherhood, literal, rabid anti-Semitism. I mean, not anti-Israel, anti-Semitism, spreading everywhere through Al Jazeera. These are the guys sending vast amounts of cash to Hamas, which wants to eliminate all of us, and Netanyahu is allowing it. So to stop those images of that vast amount of sort of U.S. dollar bills literally coming into Gaza, payments become digital and supervised, and international agencies handle all of it. But none of that changes the fundamental point. And the fundamental point is that Qatar,

funded Hamas, Israel allowed it. Nobody could really figure out how to help Gaza's population and stabilize Gaza without strengthening Hamas. Qatar wanted strengthening Hamas. That was part of the benefit Qatar saw. To everyone else, that's a problem. But Hamas sat on that spigot. Hamas always, always demanded that it is the only path to helping Gaza's population. Hamas holds Gaza's population hostage. It will only allow aid through itself, wherever it is able to do that. It's worth saying in Netanyahu's defense, most Israelis agreed with him, nearly all Israelis agreed with him most of the time. This was the prevailing concept. But for Netanyahu, this was his founding idea in how to relate to Gaza. So now he claims that, you know,

he didn't have a concept. He doesn't know what anybody's talking about. It's definitely not his fault. He's lying about that, but it was also a reasonable path for him to take at the time. Qatar has always claimed that its money was always humanitarian. It never went to Hamas's military wings to Hamas's political wings. This is something you hear from Qatari diplomats, Qatari leaders. If you Google this, you will come across that. It's ridiculous. It's not true. Nobody takes it seriously. You shouldn't either. If you hear people in the media or the press or pro-Chamas, you know, activists say things like that. They're lying to themselves, not just to you. Hamas rules the streets of Gaza. That cash is Hamas to do with as it will. It sends it to the

military wing. Qatar doesn't have to hand it to the military wing as opposed to. to the civilian infrastructure, the political infrastructure, as if Qatar could choose one or the other, as if Hamas doesn't make that decision. There's just no meaning to Qatar's own claim that it didn't fund the Nakhpa force, the military battalions, the Kassam brigades, all of that. It did. And that's also something that Israeli studies of Gaza, studies of the failures of October 7. For example, the great intelligence failure on the Israeli side of October 7 is the Sheenbitt. And it produced this report in 2025 of its failures. And one of the significant conclusions of that report was that those dollars going in that Israel allowed went very easily, very smoothly, very smoothly into the military wing and into the buildup and into the tunnel construction and into the system that would produce October 7 that was built to produce October 7 for 15 years.

It really was Qatari money that built the October 7th. have an attack and all of the infrastructure that Hamas built for the war that came after. When you build the biggest tunnel system in the history of war, and you hunker down in it for the duration of the war for three years without letting the civilians in, and you specifically instruct the invasion force on October 7 to broadcast, and you literally give them gopros, including broadcast on Israeli social media, their massacre of Israelis. You're intending to draw the Israelis in and to have a war. happening Gaza while you're in the tunnel. Katar paid for that. It's awfully hard to look at all

this evidence and think that's not the conclusion. You can't bring $30 million in cash into Gaza and think that Hamas is not able to just get its hands on it and do with it whatever it needs, and Qatar knew that. And Qatar also then spent those three years and the decades before, laundering Hamas, advancing Hamas, platforming Hamas, and telling the Hamas narrative every step of the way. The next step in the Qatari influence over the conflict is how Al Jazeera has served as not another television station covering the Gaza war, but the main avenue of information flow out of Gaza that shaped how the world saw the Gaza war and what happened to Israel's global standing because of it. This is a story that it's almost impossible to exaggerate the power and the importance that Al Jazeera has proven it has in the Gaza War. El Jazeera broadcast into 150 countries. That's almost the entire world.

They broadcast in Arabic. They broadcast in English. They have some smaller brands, some smaller digital platforms. But the main broadcast in Arabic and English are wildly and profoundly influential and far beyond Al Jazeera's own viewership because it informs other journalistic outlets in other languages all over. the world. And it needs to be said, the journalists in El Jazeera, if you talk to them, they say they have editorial independence. They are fully funded by, or almost entirely, there's a little bit of investment here and there, but they're almost entirely funded by the Qatari state. They have editorial independence for exactly as long as the dictatorship of Qatar doesn't

need them not to have editorial independence. When they need them to say something, that is the thing they say. When they need it to focus somewhere, that is the thing they focus. So it's not that Al Jazeera journalists are literally given what to say or have their articles written for them, it's that occasionally when that is the geopolitical needs of Qatar, then it has to align. Part of Al Jazeera's strength, especially in English. In Arabic, they just say everything out loud. In English, it's all about framing Hamas in Western terms as a legitimate anti-colonial, anti-imperial, etc., resistance world, and not the Muslim Brotherhood religious vision. The framing is very different, but you're still not allowed to abandon that framing.

In other words, Al Jazeera will not cover Hamas as a great oppressive force in Palestinian politics, even though it obviously is a very significant oppressor of Palestinians. It will murder any Palestinian who resist them. It has retaken every part of Gaza, the Israeli army doesn't control, and it demands the right to control all the aid in its area. All of those things are not covered in Al Jazeera. It's not that Qatar demands constant expressions of loyalty to the ideological line because that would actually weaken Al Jazeera's influence.

It's that you're not allowed to actively go against the basic ideology. As long as you're not against us, you're for us. And that's how Al Jazeera maintains both a claim of editorial independence. Journalists might even feel they have editorial independence. put a toe out of line to the basic editorial need, and you will very quickly discover that Al Jazeera has a purpose and is funded for a reason. And so Al Jazeera's influence is not in screaming ideological screeds. It's in framing. So, for example, Israelis are framed in Al Jazeera coverage as abstractions, and not just abstractions, but in fact as institutions, as blockade and occupation and settlement.

not as individuals with families and histories and voices. There's very little, almost no platforming. Now, the government of Israel, because of this massive, you know, pro-Khamas propagandistic level of Al-Jazeera coverage, has closed the Al-Jazeera branch in Israel, the Bureau in Israel. It was 100% the case before that branch was closed. That Bureau was closed. And so Al-Jazeera actually does not platform Israeli voices in any sense that is humanizing. does platform Palestinian voices only in humanizing, does not talk about ideologies, does not talk about

Hamas, does not talk about the ideological demands of groups like Hamas, and doesn't talk about the influence of the most extreme versions of Palestinian politics and the Palestinian national cause and Palestinian Islam that are dominant in Palestinian politics. None of the problems, none of the questions, none of the big words, there are only individuals with personal stories and humanizing, you know, visuals is the only way that it frames Palestinians. And so that discrepancy is one example of how Al Jazeera manages all of this. And any dissenting views might occasionally get thrown a kind of a bone, but only then to be shouted down. And all the terminology of ethnic cleansing and genocide and apartheid and war crimes. All of that is front and center.

there are studies on this. It is far more present and platformed than in traditional Western coverage. Now, traditional Western coverage constantly platforms these claims in its coverage of the Gaza War. Al Jazeera platforms almost nothing else. Whenever it covers a Palestinian case,

the Palestinian issue, the Palestinian experience, and it covers the Palestinian experience vastly more than other major international outlets. finally, Hamas and Islamic Jihad and a few other armed groups, they are constantly broadcast. And their statements in the news, in the voice of the anchor, in the voice of the reporter, are often brought verbatim. And their claims are treated as what's actually happening. And the Israeli claims are framed as the Israeli army claims, the Israeli government claims, the Israelis believe, things like that.

And so in a thousand subtle ways that journalists have to tell you which way they want you to tilt, Al Jazeera is the most tilted. There was a comparative study in 2025 about early war reporting right after October 7. Al Jazeera English devoted more coverage to events in Gaza, quoted more Palestinian sources, produced more historical context content. In other words, this is the Nakhba. You can't understand Gaza without the Nakba. By the way, no Jewish experience, no Israeli narrative, no Israeli experience ever was part of those contexts than anyone else, including outlets like the BBC that had been criticized for tilting very much in one direction, not for being opposed to the Gaza war, criticized for only telling the Palestinian side of the story. And on the Israeli side of the story, finding some half-illiterate Israeli politician saying the most extreme thing. and that's the representative of the Israeli case.

And so the Israelis are not a rich and serious discourse and conversation and experience the Palestinians are. That is an accusation level of the BBC. And there are actual studies that the BBC does tilt that way. Al Jazeera, an order of magnitude, more. Al Jazeera made itself the great amplifier of all the accusations against Israel. Finally, when you point to this ideological campaign, ideological bent, and that it has these roots in the Muslim Brotherhood and that there is deep anti-Semitism

in the foundational ideology that the Qataris use to advance their influence in the Middle East and in the Muslim world and that that shapes the Al Jazeera coverage and the focus on Gaza and the framing of Gaza as it's framed. I don't know if you know there have been terrible wars fought with Western weapons systems

and by Western allies using Western logistical support with hundreds of thousands of dead just in the last decade, all in the Middle East, not one but several, and none of that had remotely not a tenth and sometimes maybe not a hundredth, the coverage in the Western press. Part of that is the scale of platforming within the Arab world that the West has access to because of Al Jazeera. But Al Jazeera had one more enormous advantage. When you lay out, first of all, the collapse of Israel's reputation, but also Al Jazeera's

role in amplifying, in ideologizing the coverage. the discourse, the vocabulary, the conversation, not the coverage of Palestinian death and displacement and the physical destruction in Gaza. But the way it's framed and the way it really, you know, I personally don't believe that a war like Gaza should not be front and center in the world's attention. It shouldn't be only ever Gaza. And that doesn't at all mean that Israel was okay in Gaza. You don't have to believe that. That's not what I'm arguing. I'm not arguing anything about the actual Gaza war here. I'm arguing that in the discourse, Al Jazeera, has had a profound effect by framing it a certain way, but there's one last piece,

and that's that Al Jazeera actually had the access to supply the world with this powerful material. When you say this, people like Pierce Morgan will say to you, well, you know, there could have been a much more sophisticated and complex coverage of Gaza, including how Hamas didn't let civilians into those tunnel systems. Here's the interesting point. If you're running around to a Hamas-controlled territory, you will either report. would Hamas want you to report? Or you're in danger.

And if you're running around in the interstitial spaces between Israeli and Hamas forces, there's not zero chance you'll be shot by Israeli forces. Do Israeli forces want to take the risk of shooting a CNN crew in Gaza while filming is how? There's only downsides for Israel. What's the upside? Al Jazeera is the major outlet with the resources of a major international media platform. able to get original firsthand imagery, able to deploy crews on the ground.

Al Jazeera has that access. Because that is what Al Jazeera is, and it's deeply integrated into Hamas, and Qatar is the great funder and patron of Hamas. It is working with and for Hamas in that regard, and has been for decades. Al Jazeera won't cover Hamas murdering Palestinians again and again and again.

It won't cover the anti-Chamas protest. it has literally been ordered not to. The ceremonies in which Hamas released hostages by humiliating them were literally produced by Al Jazeera. The people managing the ceremony on the ground in Gaza were on the phone with the Al Jazeera newsroom producers in Doha telling them what to do and how to run it.

Qatar built a great deal of the interpretive framework through which the world looks at Gaza and through which it looks at Israel. Qatar transformed Hamas from a struggling Palestinian faction into the great Palestinian power center. Qatar is busy now trying to make sure Hamas survives. Qatar made permanent the Palestinian divide in a way that it's fashionable on the left to blame Netanyahu for doing,

but Qatar actually did it. And Qatar is out ultimately to advance a version of Islam that is pietistic. It is literally the biggest purveyor of Muslim Brotherhood ideas in the Muslim world, in the Arab world certainly. And Qatar has a tremendous influence because of its vast wealth, because of a sovereign wealth fund in the hundreds of billions of dollars, because it is the biggest spender in foreign spender in lobbying in the United States, because its sovereign wealth funds and various other controlled funds own huge swathes of Western economies, including in places like Britain,

because its money means it has these very close relationship with Western universities and research institutions and think tanks and sports teams and politicians and corporations. American universities reported in 2025 alone $1.1 billion in Qatari gifts, Katari donations, Katari contracts. That's the number one country giving money, spending money on American higher education in the world. Now, these are people who built Al Jazeera to do what Al Jazeera is doing. What are they spending that money on in the American university?

No university can afford to lose that scale of funder. No university president, no head of a university faculty. These relationships create for Katta. access, they, you know, prestige. In the Trump administration, the Qataris have taken great pains to be extremely generous in business dealings. There's a plane that's changed hands with the Trump administration's top leadership. And that means that when the Qataris call, the Trump administration answers the phone.

Anti-Israel campus activism is funded not just by Qatar. There's, you know, Singham and the... communist billionaire affiliated with China who funds Code Pink and some other radical American activist organizations. There's a lot of funding that comes from that direction, but quite a bit of the funding comes from Qatar. Now, they don't literally cause the campus activism. They didn't, you know, they don't write the PhDs of the faculty. They don't control the campus. But if the money comes from one particular place to do one particular thing, that might have some part of the It might be some part of the explanation for why Middle Eastern Studies departments have been so incapable and unwilling to teach Israel at an academic level at the top universities in America, that university after university has just given up trying and built Israel institutes separate from Middle Eastern Studies departments, as if it's possible to understand the modern Middle East without understanding the role of Israel.

What Israeli Jews actually think happened to them in their history? Where do they come from? What is their historical experience? What do they understand about the world? how that interacts with what the other nations of the Middle East understand about what's happening to them, how each represents the other. These are fascinating and valuable and obviously central questions of academic study of the Middle East. And Middle Eastern Studies departments have decided they can't do it. And Qatari money has something to do with what is the allowable framing.

And so universities in that sense have fallen. If you can't learn part of the reality of the world that you are literally supposed to become a scholar in, and you cannot learn it because it's not appropriate politically and the money also doesn't flow in that direction, then you are many things, but you are not, all a university is is that. And so you're no longer that. That is your social function and you're no longer fulfilling it. You're ideologizing your scholarship rather than being scholarly outside, beyond, and critical of the ideologies.

Qatar plays a huge role in that with this vast international influence efforts and money. How big is this Qatari story? Look at the Qatar Gate scandal in Israel, where there are these allegations that people very close to Netanyahu were paid through intermediaries. These are allegations under investigation, but their indictments being filed. This is a very serious investigation in Israel, where some of Netanyahu's closest aides are being paid to promote favorable stories about Qatar, The suspect has to be said, Netanyahu's AIDS, the Qatar government itself, they all deny wrongdoing.

The case has not yet gone to court. It's not clear if it will or when or how. But the fact that this money changed hands explains something about just how deeply Qatar is willing to go to very sophisticated lobbying networks, public relations networks, beyond the Al Jazeera platform, beyond religious platforms, beyond directly funding and supporting and patronizing. Hamas. It is almost impossible to overstate the depth of Qatar's involvement in this conflict. The profound ways that Qatar has reshaped Palestinian politics. It didn't create the Fatahamas schism. It solidified it into a permanent feature. It didn't build the Gaza war. It was the financial and political and diplomatic backbone that allowed Hamas to build this Gaza war, to pivot to this new kind

of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It didn't engineer Israel's collapse of its international standing. I've published many times my critiques of the Israeli government in that regard, but it played a vast role far beyond the role of any

other single media outlet, any other single government, agency, state. There are a lot of governments set against Israel that constantly declare that they're against Israel, the Spanish government. None of them have had 1% of the direct influence in shaping the information environment that Qatar has had.

And so Qatar's role is really fundamental. And Qatar's ideology that it advances, partly just to advance its own geopolitical influence and soft power, partly because it believes it. This is its Islam, and it believes that this Islam should win the grand. grand ideological battles of Middle Eastern Islam. It advances these things and ultimately believes that Israel should fall,

that there should not be in Israel. Qatar has hurt Israel tremendously. Qatar has hurt the Palestinians far more. And it's time to pay close attention. And so thank you for asking this question. To the role that this country has had. To its role in Hamas, in the manipulation of the hostage crisis. Yes, tactically, they were a stabilizing force in Gaza.

That's what that money was doing. That's why Netanyahu acquiesce to it. Strategically, they might be the single biggest agent outside of the land itself for destabilization and war. Thank you for listening.