September 10, 2025 - 10:00am
Israel has a moral right to pursue any and all Hamas operatives responsible for the October 7, 2023 terrorist attacks, the worst massacre of Jews since 1945. Israel’s strike on a Hamas compound in Doha, Qatar, might be morally defensible, but it just as clearly undermined American interests.
In a social media post later on Tuesday, President Donald Trump observed that while Israel had warned the US of an imminent attack, it was “unfortunately too late to stop the attack”. Trump added that “Unilaterally bombing inside Qatar, a Sovereign Nation and close Ally of the United States, that is working very hard and bravely taking risks with us to broker Peace, does not advance Israel or America’s goals.” What’s more, he “assured [Qatar] that such a thing will not happen again on their soil”.
Trump is right to be angry. Amid fury over the humanitarian situation in Gaza, the US is now Israel’s sole reliable ally. In that context alone, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should have hesitated before taking action that he would have known would cause significant negative political damage in America.
Yes, Qatar built its 2022 World Cup on the backs of slave labourers. Yes, Qatar has sheltered and funded various jihadist groups including Hamas, al Qaeda, and Isis. But Qatar has also acted as a key mediator in US diplomacy with the Taliban and more recently with Hamas. It hosts the headquarters for American military forces in the Middle East and a major US airbase. And, terrorist funding notwithstanding, Qatar also acts as a highly useful intelligence partner for Washington. Perhaps most importantly from Trump’s perspective, it provides major economic investment into the US, with the potential to grow exponentially in the President’s second term.
It’s unclear why Netanyahu ordered this strike now. Frustration with Hamas’s refusal to engage in serious negotiations towards ending the war in Gaza and releasing Israeli hostages is one motive. But killing your negotiating partners leaves little obvious room for future negotiations. In that regard, Netanyahu likely also saw this strike as a means of consolidating his far-Right base — which opposes any peaceful settlement in Gaza — by delaying the potential for near-term peace talks.
Still, by deliberately failing to provide any actionable prior warning to the Trump administration for this attack, Israel has made Trump look like an unreliable and weak ally to the Arab monarchies. The Saudis and Qataris might hate each other, but they like Trump more than they did Joe Biden or Barack Obama. The simple reason for this is that they believed Trump had the political capital and resolve to stop Israel from taking actions which obviously undercut their core security interests.
They view this calculation as the key cause for their vast economic investments. Netanyahu has now shown Trump’s capital to be worth far less than it appeared this time last week. Indeed, the US President implicitly recognised as much in his pledge that “such a thing will not happen again on [Qatar’s] soil.”
This is a problem for America, and the political fallout from this incident will reverberate in Riyadh and Dubai. That matters because the Sunni-Arab cultural understanding of trust-transaction relationships has underpinned their growing links with China and Russia. And while Russian influence in the Middle East has been depleted by the loss of ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Chinese influence in the Middle East is only growing. Given that Netanyahu has shown an extraordinary willingness to prioritise Chinese interests over those of the US, there is a risk that yesterday’s attack will move America’s Arab allies closer into Beijing’s orbit.
Netanyahu deliberately chose to ignore American strategic interests yesterday. While he has eliminated a few mid- to high-level Hamas terrorists, he has also made Trump and America look weak and unreliable in a strategic environment where Israel desperately depends on US diplomatic support. In doing so, he is playing a dangerous game.
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