One byproduct of Israel’s attempted strike on a Hamas gathering in Qatar has been a more honest public conversation about the global propaganda campaign engulfing Western society.

It’s worth going back to January 2024, just a few months after Hamas launched the war, to a moment that encapsulated the tension at the center of Qatar’s role as Hamas patron and hostage negotiator.

A recording was leaked of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talking to families of hostages still held in Gaza. “Qatar, from my point of view, is no different in essence than the United Nations… and the Red Cross,” Netanyahu can be heard saying. Qatar is even “more problematic,” he said, but his administration must work with them to “help me get [the hostages] home.”

He added: “I have no illusions about them. They have leverage [over Hamas]… Because [Qatar] funds them.”

Qatar’s role in the conflict had been for years to, essentially, pay off Hamas to keep the level of conflict below a boiling point. We can assume the thinking behind it went something like this: If Gaza stays reasonably quiet long enough, it’ll become the new norm and it will then be harder for Hamas to drag the enclave into an all-out war because calm, not violence, will be the status quo. That Hamas was being paid to artificially keep the temperature lower didn’t change the fact that the people of Gaza might get used to life at a different speed.

Bibi’s comments to the hostage families in January 2024, then, could be interpreted in two different ways. One, that he was defending Israel’s cooperation with Qatar. Two, that Qatar was untrustworthy.

Both were correct. But Qatar decided to focus on the second part. “If the reported remarks are found to be true, the Israeli PM would only be obstructing and undermining the mediation process, for reasons that appear to serve his political career instead of prioritizing saving innocent lives, including Israeli hostages,” tweeted a spokesman for the Qatari Foreign Ministry.

This was nonsense—Netanyahu was explaining why he would continue to work with Qatar despite the drawbacks. But the drawbacks were real, and one of them was the fact that as Hamas’s patron, Qatar will put its significant resources toward discrediting and delegitimizing anyone who opposes Hamas. That means not just Israel but the entirety of the pro-democracy West.

Qatar’s investment in soft power projection is by now world famous. In recent years, Qatar has spent millions on U.S. think tanks and billions on American universities, where it has funded and fueled anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. The regime spends a fortune on its propaganda network, the flagship vehicle of which is Al Jazeera, which has an audience of hundreds of millions around the world, but which also includes hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying, advertising, and alleged coverage-shaping investments in American media firms and reported investments in social-media bot networks.

In recent days, Netanyahu has talked openly about the threat of Qatari propaganda as well as that coming from an even more dangerous and cash-rich source.

“One is China,” Netanyahu said yesterday. “And the other is Qatar. They are organizing an attack on Israel… [through] the social media of the Western world and the United States. We will have to counter it, and we will counter it with our own methods.”

Then speaking with i24 news, the prime minister reiterated: “There is now an attempt to impose a blockade on Israel by various entities and countries, led by Qatar. First of all, a media blockade funded with enormous sums of money, both from Qatar and from other countries such as China.”

Netanyahu is correct, though he has been hesitant to say this kind of thing. Israel maintains a delicate balance of relations with China, which is a patron of Iran, with which Israel has been at war. China also backs Russia, which makes the destabilization of the West a strategic priority.

But when Netanyahu talks about China’s role in global propaganda, he isn’t kidding. As I wrote last year, China has a three-pronged propaganda strategy. The first prong is social media, including but not limited to China’s control of TikTok and the content viewed by its 1 billion monthly users. The second prong involves having its propaganda proxies fund and organize the pro-Hamas movement in the U.S., including protests, demonstrations, and conferences that have the support of outlawed terrorist groups.

And the third prong involves the manipulation of non-Chinese social media apps with fake accounts.

If Netanyahu’s comments this week are any indication, when it comes to public discussion of China and Qatar’s malignant role in the propaganda wars, the seal has been broken. Hopefully the West will take note and take action.