The Great Wall of China snaked ahead of us shortly after we, a collection of Israeli journalists, emerged from Air China’s inaugural flight from Tel Aviv to Beijing.
Ignoring the Jundu Mountains’ topography, the titanic structure epitomized the contrast between the previous China’s seclusion and the new China’s resolve to embrace the outer world.
It was 1993, and the new China journey was young. Bicycles still dominated Beijing’s traffic, Air China was five years old, the stock market was three years old, and the Israeli embassy in Beijing was even younger, but all knew Israel would fit well in China’s new direction, as it indeed did.
The new China replaced Mao Zedong’s anti-Israeli acidity with the vibrant relationship that is now underscored by vast Chinese investments in Israeli infrastructure and massive Israeli involvement in major Chinese universities’ development.
In recent months, however, fresh acid has been pouring into China’s relations with the Jewish state and the Jewish people as Beijing, squinting at Gaza while juggling global agendas, took a very wrong turn.
China’s intimacy with Iran is regrettable, but logical
CHINA’S TRADITIONAL request from the Mideast’s many belligerents – keep the noise down – was understandable. Superpowers don’t have to take a stand in every conflict.
China’s lone demand toward its oil suppliers – keep it running – is also understandable, if even regrettable. China is the world’s largest oil importer, buying roughly three times the volume of India’s oil imports and four times Japan’s.
Even more regrettable, but still logical, is China’s intimacy with Iran. It’s natural for the one’s energetic supply to meet the other’s energetic demand.
That’s why, when looking at Gaza, China doesn’t go into details. If Hamas is backed by Iran, then that’s reason enough for Beijing to back Hamas and effectively legitimize its mass deployment of murderers, rapists, arsonists, and human traffickers.
Israelis were thus not surprised when China on October 25 vetoed a proposed UN Security Council resolution that mentioned Israel’s right to self-defense and did not demand a halt to its war of defense.
That is, of course, far more revolting, from an Israeli viewpoint, but in itself still not much worse than the cynicism with which some Western governments responded to the worst anti-Jewish atrocity since the Holocaust.
All this is bad enough, but in recent weeks Beijing has entered a dark cave where China had never been: antisemitism.
China’s social media is a vector for antisemitism
THE NEW Chinese antisemitism’s main arena is China’s closely supervised social media.
Influencers with large followings on Chinese platforms TikTok, Weibo, and Bilibili have been virulently anti-Israeli, some defining Hamas as a liberator, some questioning the Black Sabbath Massacre’s events, and some denying the Jewish state’s right to exist.
A post by news commentator Hu Xijin reportedly said he is afraid Israel will “wipe the Earth out of the solar system.” TV personality Zheng Jufeng said American Jews “dominate finance, media, and Internet sectors” and suggested that Washington’s support of Israel reflects its surrender to Jewish pressure, which in turn reflects what he cited as American Jews’ disproportionate share of American wealth.
Most ominously, President Xi Jinping told a BRICS (Brazil-India-China-South Africa) summit last month that the Palestinian people are being denied “the right to survival,” thus effectively blood libeling Israel.
In short, China is tinkering with antisemitism, clearly failing to understand what this abomination means in general, what it means to us Jews in particular, and most crucially, what it did to those who chose to taste its venom.
ANTISEMITISM’S TOOLS are three: accusing the Jews baselessly and collectively; demanding from the Jews what others are not demanded; and denying the Jews what others are granted. The end result of all this was repeatedly one: dead Jews.
Standing once with a Taiwanese diplomat in a religious shrine in Taipei, I learned how distant this attitude has been from the Chinese way. “We Asians,” he said of China and its neighbors, “fought since antiquity countless wars over land, power, and riches, but we never fought about faith.”
Neither did the Jews, unlike the Christians and Muslims. Maybe that’s why the Chinese and the Jews have gotten along so well since the new China’s emergence.
Now Beijing is changing course, embracing not just hatred but history’s most unwarranted and lethal hatred, evidently not realizing what fire it is playing with. Faced with this threat, the task of Jews is not to tell our Chinese detractors that we are not what they claim we are. Instead, we should tell them where their choice will lead.
First, antisemitism repeatedly destroyed its bearers. Medieval Christianity, which invented antisemitism, ultimately split, fought itself, and drowned in its own blood after a 30-year war in which one-fifth of Europe’s population died. The orchestrated hatred that was directed at the Jews spun out of control and devoured all. The end of antisemitism’s next three engines – Czarist Russia, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union – was total extinction.
Second, in taking the side of Hamas, Beijing is taking not the side of national liberation, as it claims, but the side of religious imperialism, which it detests, but now effectively boosts. Sleeping with jihadism, China will in due course learn, means waking up with its teeth smiling in your face.
Lastly, China emerges from this choice as a coward, willingly shoved into an utterly un-Chinese misadventure by its Iranian friends. “It’s part of standing up to America,” the mullahs must have said.
Well, it isn’t. It’s part of standing up to the Jews, and it will lead the new China back into the old China’s walls – the walls whose first brick was laid centuries after ancient Israel’s emergence in its land; the land that global jihadism wants to conquer with China aboard the chariots of its war; the war that jihadism cannot resist, Israel cannot afford to lose, and China would be mad to join.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.
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