Middle East Is Latest Area Where Beijing Tests Washington’s Long Dominance

TEL AVIV — In what amounts to a deepening of Communist China’s incursion into areas where America has long exerted near exclusive dominance, Beijing is rolling out the red carpet for the Palestinian Authority’s president. President Abbas’s four-day visit to the Chinese capital is described as a Palestinian attempt to revive a moribund, American-led peace process. Mr. Abbas is also trying to boost his sagging domestic support while distracting attention from his administration’s mismanagement of the economy and an increasing loss of relevance in the region, where the Palestinian cause was once a unifying rallying cry. Palestine and China are “friends closer than brothers,” a Mandarin-speaking Palestinian official charged with Beijing relations, Abbas Zaki, told the state-owned news agency, Xinhua, on Monday. “I am very pleased to see that China has been more involved in Middle East affairs after the China-Arab States Summit last year.”In December, the Chinese Communist Party chairman, Xi Jinping, visited Riyadh for the first-ever gathering of Arab leaders. Meeting with Mr. Abbas, Mr. Xi vowed to “work for an early, just, and durable solution to the Palestinian issue.” Landing at Beijing Tuesday, Mr. Abbas was expected to meet Mr. Xi to discuss a Chinese Mideast peace proposal, according to the Ramallah news agency, Wafa. Beijing is feting Mr. Abbas with all the trappings of a state visit “to poke America in the eye, to show solidarity with the world’s Arabs and Muslims, and to solidify its place as a leader of the Global South,” a researcher with the Israel-China Policy Center at Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies, Tuvia Gering, tells the Sun. Meanwhile, the aging Palestinian leader is hoping to meet several top Chinese corporation executives in the hope of boosting investments in the West Bank, Mr. Gering adds.Mr. Abbas is an “old and good friend of the Chinese people,” Beijing’s foreign ministry’s spokesman, Wang Wenbin, said. Yet, a dearth of lucrative business opportunities and the Palestinian Authority’s notoriously corrupt management have deterred global investors from the West Bank. Instead, Beijing’s support for the Palestinian Authority has mostly been in highly publicized humanitarian aid. Last year Mr. Abbas praised Beijing for delivering a plane-load of medical supplies to help Ramallah cope with the Covid pandemic. As Yediot Ahronot reported, though, the Palestinian leader forgot to mention that the aid package came about after the Israeli ambassador at Beijing, Tzvi Heffetz, asked China to deliver it.Between 2021 and 2022, Communist China additionally contributed $2 million to a United Nations agency dedicated to Palestinian welfare, Unrwa. In that same period Washington’s contribution to Unrwa amounted to $682 million. Yet, Beijing seems to get much more political bang for its Yuan than America does for its dollars. In recent years Beijing has made huge strides in expanding its global influence to fulfill Mr. Xi’s stated goal of replacing America as top global power. Beyond its immediate neighborhood and the rest of Asia, China has made incursions into Africa and the Western hemisphere, where most recently it paid Cuba to set up a spy shop on America’s doorstep. The White House is dismissing the importance of such incursions, including by initially denying the veracity of the Wall Street Journal’s report on the Beijing-Havana cash-for-access deal, and then describing it as an old, Trump-era story. Similarly, Washington is reacting stoically to China’s growing influence in the Mideast.In March, Beijing facilitated a thaw in Saudi-Iranian relations. Last week Secretary Blinken was asked, while in Riyadh, if that diplomatic feat meant that America is losing out to its top global competitor. “I don’t ascribe to this zero-sum game,” Mr. Blinken said. No wonder Beijing diplomats are attempting to show success where America has failed in facilitating Palestinian-Israeli peace. Yet, though negotiations between Jerusalem and Ramallah have been frozen since 2014, President Biden continues his attempts at promoting an elusive “two-state solution” — often to the Israeli government’s chagrin.Administration officials reacted furiously to an Axios report this week that Israel intends to build 4,000 new housing units in existing West Bank settlements. “We have long made clear our concerns about additional settlements in the West Bank, that we don’t want to see actions taken that are going to make a two-state solution that much more difficult to achieve,” the National Security Council spokesman, John Kirby, said Monday. Several presidents have long promoted Palestinian-Israeli talks since the early 1990s, when Washington brokered the Oslo accords. Now, with a lightly detailed three-point peace plan and a few yuan, Beijing is trying to boost Mr. Abbas — and to take charge of an arena into which America has for decades poured diplomatic, political, and financial resources. “Perhaps money can’t buy you friends and influence after all,” Mr. Gering says.

Middle East Is Latest Area Where Beijing Tests Washington’s Long Dominance

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