Shortly after we Israeli journalists emerged from the first Air China flight from Tel Aviv to Beijing, the Great Wall of China snaked before our eyes.
This gigantic structure, which ignores the topography of the Jundu Mountains, symbolizes the contrast between China’s former isolationism and the new country’s determination to embrace the outside world.
In 1993, a new journey to China was still young. Bicycles still dominate Beijing’s traffic, Air China is five years old, the stock market is three years old, and the Israeli embassy in Beijing is even younger, but Israel fits well into China’s new direction. Everyone knew it would happen, and it did.
The new China has replaced Mao Zedong’s hardline anti-Israel stance with a now vibrant relationship punctuated by massive Chinese investment in Israeli infrastructure and extensive Israeli involvement in the development of China’s leading universities. Replaced with
But in recent months, China’s relations with the Jewish state and its people have been cast a new strain, as Beijing has taken a very wrong turn as it juggles global policies while narrowing its eyes on Gaza. .
The closeness between China and Iran is unfortunate but logical.
China’s traditional demands (shut up the noise) from many belligerent powers in the Middle East were understandable. Superpowers do not have to take a stand in every conflict.
China’s only request to oil-supplying countries is to “continue their operations,” which is unfortunate but understandable. China is the world’s largest oil importer, purchasing approximately three times the amount of oil imported by India and four times the amount of oil imported by Japan.
Even more unfortunate, but still logical, is China’s closeness with Iran. It is natural that the energy supply of one meets the energy demand of the other.
That is why China does not go into details about Gaza. If Hamas is supported by Iran, that is enough reason for the Chinese government to support Hamas, effectively justifying its mass deployment of murderers, rapists, arsonists, and human traffickers.
Therefore, Israelis were not surprised when China on October 25 vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that referred to Israel’s right to self-defense and did not call for an end to the defensive war.
From an Israeli perspective, of course, this is far more revolting than the cynicism with which some Western governments responded to the worst anti-Semitic atrocities since the Holocaust. It’s not terrible.
That’s bad enough, but in recent weeks the Chinese government has entered a dark cave it has never entered before: anti-Semitism.
Chinese social media is a vector for anti-Semitism
The main arena for the new Chinese anti-Semitism is social media, which is closely monitored by China.
Influencers with large followings on Chinese platforms TikTok, Weibo, and Bilibili are vehemently anti-Israel, with some defining Hamas as a liberator and others questioning the Black Sabbath massacre. Some deny the Jewish state’s right to exist.
A post by news commentator Hu Xijin reportedly said he feared Israel would “wipe Earth out of the solar system.” Television personality Zheng Jufeng said that American Jews “dominate the financial, media and internet sectors” and that the US government’s support for Israel reflects capitulation to Jewish pressure, which in turn suggested it reflected the disproportionate share of American Jews in U.S. wealth.
Most ominously, President Xi Jinping claimed at last month’s BRICS (Brazil-India-China-South Africa) summit that the Palestinian people were being denied the “right to exist,” effectively blood libeling Israel. he said.
In short, China is toying with anti-Semitism, what this abhorrent act means in general, what it means to us Jews in particular, and most importantly, its poison. Clearly unable to understand what it did to those who chose to taste it.
There are three methods of anti-Semitism. It is a collective condemnation of Jews without basis. Demanding from Jews what others do not. And Jews deny what is given to others. The end result of all this was one thing over and over again: the death of the Jews.
As I stood with a Taiwanese diplomat at a religious shrine in Taipei, I realized how far from China’s approach this attitude is. “We Asians have fought countless wars over land, power and wealth since ancient times, but never over faith,” he said of China and its neighbors.
Unlike Christians and Muslims, neither were Jews. Perhaps that is why the Chinese and Jews have gotten along so well since the advent of New China.
Now the Chinese government has changed tack and embraced not just hatred but the most unjust and deadly hatred in history, apparently not realizing what kind of fire they are toying with. The task of Jews in the face of this threat is not to tell our Chinese detractors that we are not who they claim to be. Instead, we should tell them where their choices will lead.
First, anti-Semitism has repeatedly destroyed its bearers. Medieval Christianity, which gave birth to anti-Semitism, ultimately split after a 30-year war that killed a fifth of Europe’s population, fighting its own battles and drowning in its own blood. The systematic hatred directed against the Jews had spun out of control and consumed everything. The next three engines of anti-Semitism, Tsarist Russia, Nazi Germany, and the end of the Soviet Union, have completely disappeared.
Second, by siding with Hamas, the Chinese government is not on the side of national liberation, as China claims, but on the side of religious imperialism, which China detests but is now effectively promoting. You will be standing on the side. Sleeping with jihadism, as China will eventually learn, means waking up and showing its teeth.
In the end, China emerges from this choice as a coward, willingly forced into an entirely un-Chinese misadventure by Iran’s friends. “This is also part of standing up to America,” the mullahs must have said.
it’s not. It would be part of the fight against the Jews, and it would bring the new China back within the walls of old China, walls where the first bricks were laid centuries after ancient Israel emerged in the land. The lands that global jihadism is trying to conquer along with China on the chariots of war. Jihadism cannot resist this war, Israel cannot afford to lose, and China will be eager to join.
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The author, a fellow at the Hartman Institute, is the author of the bestseller Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (Jewish Folly, Yedioth Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist historical account of Jewish political leadership. It is.