Following failure in withholding Hamas, now is Doha's chance to rebrand - comment

Six months have passed since the terrible October 7 massacre, when sadistic, radical Hamas terrorists stormed into dormant communities, paraglided into parties, and burst into bases, burning entire families alive, raping innocent partygoers, taking babies, toddlers, and Holocaust survivors as hostages, and sparking a fierce response from Israel.

The international community has long forgotten these atrocities which started the war in the first place, gradually shifting to demand of Israel to stop fighting those who pledged to commit the same horrors against it again and again.

Some have even indulged themselves in the largest gaslighting campaign in the world, blatantly denying some of the most documented crimes in history and destroying posters calling for the release of innocent hostages aged from as young as one to as old as 86.

The fact that the leaders of Hamas oversaw the entire operation from their fancy five-star hotels in Doha is known. And that the Qatari government never thought of showing an ounce of introspection, uttering a word of apology, or even partly condemning the massacre committed by the criminal organization they have been empowering and harboring for decades – is sadly not very surprising, either.

Yet now, for some reason, the world looks to Doha as if it is the messiah who will bring about the release of the Israeli hostages, human beings who are being abused daily – physically, mentally, and sexually – by the same captors who only just recently have murdered their families and neighbors.

It must be stressed that responsibility for the lives of our hostages largely lies in the hands of Doha (putting aside the sadistic terrorists holding them in the tunnels). From a redheaded one year old baby to an 86-year-old grandfather - the responsibility to all of these innocent lives lies on the shoulders of the sheikh, depending on his level of creativity in pressuring the leaders of the fanatic religious extremist group. After all, the Hamas leaders’ safe haven in Doha hotels is within reach of the royal palace.

This is because Qatar has many tools to pressure Hamas; they simply need to apply them. They can freeze accounts, nationalize assets, downgrade the terrorist leaders to economy class, or, heavens forbid, buy them a Subaru instead of a BMW.

For all we know, they can take Hamas leaders into a dark alley and tell them that there’s no going out until the hostages are released now. The sheikh can threaten to ban Hamas leaders from the country forever. He can threaten them by turning his gargantuan propaganda machine against them and shame them on an international level.

Where there is a will, there is a way. The only question remains: is there such a will?

In this context, it is necessary to stress in the strongest possible way that a deal featuring the release of convicted Palestinian murderers, who enjoy visiting hours, lawyers, fair trials, gyms, and supervised nutrition on the one hand, in juxtaposition to Israeli babies, mothers, and elderly civilians who were and are kept in the exact opposite conditions on the other, can never be framed within the context of a “fair exchange deal.”

Surely Doha would never want to see its legacy remaining as that of an actor who showed so much weakness in applying pressure on their own special guests that they ended up creating an equation in which babies and grandparents were equal to murderers and terrorists, thus teaching all Jihadist movements that kidnapping women and children is indeed an applicable tactic for achieving their goals?

A narrow time window to rebrand

“It’s good for both Israel and the US that Hamas is under our scrutiny in Doha. This way, we can oversee their actions. So, we shouldn’t drive them out,” they might argue in Qatar.

Well, that this attempted scrutiny did not go so well on October 7 is no secret.

“But Israel was the one who asked us to pay Gazan families and PA salaries,” they might push back, denying any responsibility for the money coming into Gaza and spilled into tunnel digging and rocket manufacturing, and conveniently ignoring any plausible connection between guests in Doha’s hotels and their counterparts inside the Gaza Strip.

And indeed, the Israeli public has surely learned its lesson and understood well enough who can never be trusted again to run any civil operation in the area.

Experts also say that Qatar seeks to grow closer to the West while not having to give up on its unique traditional identity, which explains the many changes it made in terms of legal affairs, as was evident during the FIFA World Cup.

Some, such as IMPACT-se, a renowned institute that specializes in analyzing educational systems, even pointed to the positive changes Qatar made to school textbooks, removing examples of antisemitism and racism from their curricula.

However, Qatar is still operating problematic mechanisms abroad in terms of politics, media, and education.

For one, Qatar’s support of Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated regimes, parties, social initiatives, and religious institutions across the world and in the West is a source of concern. A quick reminder: the Muslim Brotherhood is the spiritual ancestor of Salafi Jihadism, which incubated organizations such as al-Qaeda and ISIS and was based on utterly antisemitic European pretexts, imported and translated into Islamic ideology by the likes of the prominent Egyptian Islamic scholar Sayyid Qutb.

Nowadays, it is an incarnation of expansionist political and social aspirations under religious pretexts far outreaching the local Middle Eastern geography, which don’t necessarily coincide with Western ideals of liberalism and freedoms.

In the field of media, Qatari propaganda gargantuan Al Jazeera spews rhetoric filled with antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and rejection of any presence of a Jewish state in the Jews’ ancestral homeland – especially, but not exclusively, on its Arabic-speaking outlets.

The channel directly broadcasts videos made by Hamas military propaganda, showing terrorists as positive role models and constantly dehumanizing Israelis. Simultaneously, their West-facing platform, AJ+, knowingly ignites the fuel of neo-Marxist ideas regarding social, economic, and even racial issues, which in turn creates discord and conflict within Western society. All the while, the channel manages to bypass official registration under the FARA Act in the US, for example.

On the issue of education, Qatari-funded faculties in many fields, from social studies to exact sciences, raise much concern, with some connecting them to the widespread anti-Israel sentiments in many faculties.

One worrying example is the Texas A&M University affair; astronomical amounts of Qatari funds as well as scientific rights and collaborations were concealed from public eyes. This ultimately led to the decision to shut down the campus in Qatar altogether. Qatari involvement in K-12 education systems in the US is also notable, with Doha-funded content completely ignoring, if not eliminating, the existence of Israel and Jewish history, promoting the “Palestine from the river to the sea” agenda instead.

Qatar’s opportunity for change

As the Jewish saying goes, “As long as the candle is lit – it is possible to repair.”

Like some of their counterparts in the Gulf and beyond, the regime in Doha has tremendous potential to become an agent who stands for peace and stability, promotes understanding and multiculturalism in the region, and invests its remarkable wealth and inexhaustible energy in initiatives that empower a sense of approaching one another rather than endorsing destabilizing actors – all without having to give up on any of its traditional values.

Qatar can and should live up to its ethos: divest from delegitimizing, conspiratorial, and antisemitic propaganda; detach from the political and social crusade against the West; push forward peace-building initiatives; and use all its resources to punish and pressure Hamas to give up their arms, release the hostages, and mark a path for a regional solution to the conflict.

And finally, in the spirit of our nearing Passover: Qatar, let our people go!