Israel’s war against Hamas has reached a crossroads. If the goal is to destroy Hamas, the role of Qatar can no longer be ignored. Qatar is Iran’s chief Sunni ally. Fabulously wealthy, it is the world’s top exporter of liquified natural gas and is vying with the US to replace Russia’s exports to Europe.

Qatar’s other main export is Muslim Brotherhood-style Islamism which it disseminates via its state-owned network Al Jazeera. It also supports terrorists. Along with Turkey, it was the only country to back Hamas when it ousted Fatah in a bloody coup in Gaza in 2006. Since then, along with Iran, it has become the main foreign player in Palestinian affairs. It has transferred at least $1.8 billion to Hamas and in 2012 it opened a Hamas office in its capital, Doha. The then-head of Hamas, Khaled Meshal, transferred there in 2012, and the current head of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, has resided in Doha since 2016.

Qatar also acts as a conduit for the Taleban and even offered banking services to the branch of Isis responsible for beheading US journalist Steven Sotloff in 2014. Qatar’s support for Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood is loathed by Sunni Muslim governments in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, all of which broke off relations with Qatar in 2017, calling for it to close Al Jazeera and curb relations with Iran. This is hardly surprising.

Iran is seeking regional hegemony by toppling Arab Sunni governments through military insurgencies waged by Iranian-backed militias. It already controls Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen – the Shia crescent – and Sunni Arab governments in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, and UAE fear that it will stir up Shia majorities or minorities in their countries too. This is not just a regional Muslim spat because Iran seeks to control 70 to 80 per cent of the world’s oil.

For decades, the US has been the ally of the Arab Sunni governments and Israel but under President Barack Obama it dangerously shifted support towards Iran. Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) sought only to curb Iran’s nuclear program to the point that if it decided to pursue a nuclear weapon it would take at least one year, supposedly giving the world time to respond. In exchange, Iran would get sanctions relief. The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the JCPOA and its strategy of maximum pressure on Iran provided the impetus for Sunni governments to sign on to Trump’s Abraham Accords.

Qatar’s terror diplomacy received the approval of the Obama regime and was tolerated by the Trump administration. The argument was that the Qataris would be a moderating influence says Richard Goldberg, the coordinator of Trump’s maximum pressure campaign on Iran and a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies.

All that must change, argues Goldberg, following the massacre on 7 October which was not just the single greatest slaughter of Jews since the end of the second world war, but the single biggest US hostage crisis since 1979. Goldberg says backing Qatar was a fatal mistake and must be reversed or it will lead to further barbaric attacks.

Goldberg is not alone. Another voice calling for maximum pressure to be put on Qatar is Yigal Carmon, the founder and president of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). Carmon is calling for Qatar to be declared a state sponsor of terrorism and the imposition of legal and economic sanctions. He is also calling for the filing of international lawsuits over Qatari assistance to Hamas, Al-Qaeda, Isis, the Taleban and Hezbollah, the extradition of Hamas’s leaders, and for them to be targeted in Doha.

The fact that Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian met with Hamas Political Bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh in Doha on 31 October tells you everything you need to know about Qatar’s sympathies.

Ultimately, the US holds the trump card (no pun intended). Qatar hosts Al Udeid, the largest US military base in the Middle East with over 100,000 US servicemen, the US Air Force Central Command and the 379th Air Expeditionary Wing. This is a source of security for Qatar but given Qatari support for Iran and its terror network, the US should move the base to a more reliable ally.

The US State Department sees Qatar as a useful conduit of communication with Hamas and the Taliban and is working with Qatar to see the release of Israeli hostages but Secretary of State Antony Blinken has condemned Hamas’s unconscionable brutality and says there can be no more business as usual. Blinken is right.

As Australian-born Mark Regev, senior adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu told Sky News Australia this week, ‘As long as Hamas is in power, Israelis don’t feel safe.’ The truth is that they aren’t safe. The Hamas leadership has said that it will repeat the October 7 attacks again and again.

‘You wouldn’t agree to live next to a terrorist enclave, why should we?’ he asked. ‘The goal is the end of Hamas’s rule in Gaza and the return of all our hostages,’ he added. ‘It will take as long as it takes, but that’s our goal and we will reach that goal.’

That won’t please Pakistani-born Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi, who posed on Friday beside a placard reading, ‘Keep the world clean,’ with a picture of an Israeli flag over a rubbish bin. It won’t please the Socialist Alliance (Eco-socialists) and the Socialist Alternative (Trotskyites) which organise the school student strikes for Palestine. Perhaps the Greens and their splittist mates could discuss zero-emissions targets with Iran and Qatar.

It won’t please the activist actors at the Sydney Theatre Company who have relied on the largesse of Jewish benefactors for decades but donned Palestinian keffiyehs at the end of their performance of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. Perhaps they should schedule a season in Gaza and see how their performance goes down with the Islamists.

It won’t please journalists who signed an open letter last week claiming that Israel’s war on Hamas poses an unprecedented threat to press freedom. Perhaps Queer ABC journalist Benjamin Law who signed the letter could report on Queer Rights in Palestine.

It won’t please UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres who, on 20 November said, ’We are witnessing a killing of civilians that is unparalleled and unprecedented in any conflict since I have been Secretary-General.’ Guterres obviously slept through the Tigray war in Ethiopia from 2020-2022 in which 162,000 to 600,000 people were killed, the Syrian civil war that started in 2011 in which more than 300,000 civilians and more than 300,000 combatants have been killed, the ongoing massacre of the Rohingya in Myanmar in which more than 25,000 people have perished, China’s genocidal program targeting Uighur Muslims in which around one million people have been detained, subjected to forced abortion, sterilisation, forced labour, and organ harvesting, and some 500,000 battlefield casualties in the war in Ukraine. Perhaps Guterres might care to explain why the war against Hamas is worse than all these other wars.

On 29 October, in the Wall Street Journal, Qatar’s ambassador to the US Meshal bin Hamad Al Thani wrote that Qatar is the Middle East’s honest broker, that it doesn’t endorse Hamas, and that it has been the target of a campaign of disinformation. Those excuses should no longer cut it. As Obama said on 4 November,’ If you want to solve the problem, then you have to take in the whole truth and you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree.’ Perhaps. But some are more complicit than others. Starting with Obama and with Qatar.