For many concerned about Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons, the controversy over the Gaza flotilla has served as a disturbing and decidedly unhelpful distraction from the need to maintain pressure on the Obama administration to act to avert that awful possibility. The same theme was sounded in the past few months as the administration said that Israel must stop building housing in Jerusalem to free up Obama and the rest of the West to better resist Iran.

The swelling chorus of editorial pages, Western political leaders, and unnamed administration officials who want Israel to back down on Gaza claim that doing so will not only help the suffering inhabitants of the region but also remove an irritant that hampers Western diplomatic goals. The need for a “new approach” to Gaza was sounded by one such anonymous Obama aide in the New York Times yesterday, who said that this is “a broadly held view in the upper reaches of the administration.”

Despite the fact that the claims of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza are unfounded, the administration is following the lead of our Western European allies on this issue. “Gaza has become the symbol in the Arab world of the Israeli treatment of Palestinians, and we have to change that,” the senior American official said. Indeed, such a switch would reflect the same sensibility that guided Obama’s speech to the Muslim world a year ago in Cairo, in which the president showed that he cared about appeasing the violent prejudices of the Arab “street” more than he cared about articulating American values like support for democracy or the West’s strategic goals in fighting Islamist terror.

The blockade of Gaza restricts the importation of arms and construction materials that could allow the Hamas regime there to rebuild its defense. It does not restrict food and medicine. It was implemented in the wake of Hamas’s seizure of power in the strip, a bloody coup that took the lives of many Palestinians. Indeed, even the diplomatic Quartet of the United States, Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations vowed not to deal with Hamas until it recognized Israel’s right to exist and renounced violence. But having refused to do either, or to free an Israeli soldier who has been held captive since 2006, Hamas is hoping that Western sympathy ginned up by the flotilla incident will result in an end to the blockade and ultimately recognition for the Islamist regime they have established in Gaza and which they hope to eventually extend to the West Bank. Granting Hamas such a victory would do more than any Israeli settlement could ever do to undermine the rival Palestinian Authority led by Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas or the administration’s unlikely hopes for peace.

But just as important is the fact that Hamas — like Hezbollah, its terrorist counterpart in Lebanon — is a key ally of Iran. The West backed the blockade in the first place partially to prevent Gaza from becoming an armed Iranian enclave on the Mediterranean. Despite the claim that the blockade can be lifted without Iran or Hamas benefiting, it is hard to see how any alternative to the current restrictions will do anything but allow Hamas to freely import both arms and ammunition from its patron in Tehran and permanently establish its hold on power. Aside from the devastating impact this would have on hopes for more Palestinian moderation, it would give Iran even more leverage to resist international pressure on the nuclear issue.

Far from being a distraction from the faltering efforts of the Obama administration to assemble an international coalition to stop Iran’s nuclear program, handing such a triumph to Hamas will make it even more difficult to restrain the ambitions of the Khamenei/Ahmadinejad regime in Tehran. If the West hasn’t the stomach to hold firm on the sanctions that have been imposed on Hamas-run Gaza, how will it do so in Iran? The Iranian regime is surely drawing dangerous conclusions about Western resolve from the way the administration is succumbing to the propaganda campaign orchestrated by its Hamas ally. Far from being obstacles to action on Iran, Israel’s attempts to preserve the blockade of Hamas is a fundamental element of any coherent strategy that aims at restraining Tehran’s influence.