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China’s Malicious Influence in the Middle East
More than a dozen Palestinian factions, including Fatah and Hamas, signed a joint declaration in Beijing last month to create an interim unity government that would operate in both the West Bank and Gaza. But the deal has no implementation mechanism, and there is no apparent settlement of the Hamas-Fatah war that started in 2007 and has been brewing on the West Bank since 2021.
The declaration in Beijing raised a few eyebrows, but mostly for the wrong reasons.
China has recognized “Palestine” since 1988, with little impact on the region. For the Palestinians, especially Hamas, being hosted in Beijing in the post-October 7 period was appealing, even if it didn’t solve any of their problems. But China’s moves in the Middle East and Red Sea are less designed to boost Palestinian statehood than they are to speed the decline in American influence in the region – and China is well placed to do just that.
In 2023, China was the top purchaser of Iranian oil, some 60% above pre-sanction peaks recorded in 2017. With that base, Beijing reached out to Saudi Arabia and brokered a Saudi-Iran “reconciliation” agreement, seven years after the Saudis had severed relations in the aftermath of an Iranian mob setting the Saudi embassy in Tehran on fire.
China has also increased its support of the Iranian-sponsored Houthi terrorist movement in the Red Sea, where the US has been unwilling or unable to prevent attacks on Western shipping, reducing traffic through Egypt’s vital Suez Canal by more than 50 percent.
Bloomberg News reports, however, that the Houthis “have told China and Russia their ships can sail through the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden without being attacked, according to several people with knowledge of the militant group’s discussions.”
China’s hostility toward Israel has also increased, particularly as Israel has limited its technology-sharing with China over the past several years, culminating in China’s pro-Hamas UN Security Council Resolutions after the October 7 massacre.
Some history is in order here.
For centuries, Great Britain was the guarantor of freedom of the seas and security in the Middle East. After World War II and into the mid-1950s, as Britain divested itself of its colonies and responsibilities, the United States took over. It was a major realignment that had both promise and problems.
The standard American schoolroom map of that period (you remember it, right?) placed the US in the center of the world, between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The eastern Pacific was ours – Canada, Mexico, Central America and Chile. Then the ocean, and on the western side, a series of American allies or trading partners – Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and even, more recently, Vietnam.
We assumed that, from China’s point of view looking to its east, the US was in charge of the Pacific. However, as China worked to change its economic and political fortunes over the past few decades, the country looked to its west – where it has relatively unimpeded access to the energy-rich countries of Central Asia and the Middle East, and then south to Africa — with the Indian Ocean as a vital waterway. The China People’s Liberation Army naval base in Djibouti opened in 2017, just north of the American base at Camp Lemonnier and the French and Japanese bases in the Red Sea.
China’s rise in the Middle East has moved in tandem with Biden administration policy that has irritated our traditional ally Saudi Arabia; offered support, including sanctions relief and financial support, to Iran, the Houthis, and the Palestinians; and frightened the Abraham Accord countries (the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Israel).
As our longtime friends in the Middle East and Persian Gulf see it, the US has abandoned the role we have historically played – the “indispensable nation,” the security guarantor, protecting their ability to pump, sell, and move oil. President Biden is giving Iran waivers to sell oil to China. US power still controls the sea lanes, but China gets the benefit — and they’ve been using their money to build commercial ports all along the route from Iran to the Pacific and then military facilities along the islands they’re building in the Pacific.
China’s political overtures to both sides of the Sunni-Shiite conflict in the region, plus increasing presence on the waterways from the Middle East to Asia, and purchases of crucial raw material and mineral assets in Africa – without waging a physical war in any of them – makes the broad picture much more frightening than the hosting of Fatah and Hamas in Beijing.
Many former (or current) US allies are leaning into China. We might think we are “the indispensable nation,” but they may not. China doesn’t talk about “democracy” or “uprooting corruption,” or even “women’s rights.” It goes for political and economic benefit which doesn’t threaten the people of the region. But that might just be for now.
Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly.
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UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage
A campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov drew the condemnation of UCLA’s student government on Tuesday. In an open letter, the UCLA Students Associated Council said that bringing Tov to speak to students “served to legitimize and normalize” atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Shem Tov, 23, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza until his release in a prisoner exchange in February 2025. UCLA hosted him on April 14 for a Yom HaShoah event.
“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the student government letter wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the UCLA administration and UCLA Hillel among others. “Israel is currently continuing to carry out what has been widely identified by human rights advocates as a genocide in Gaza, while also expanding its illegal military campaign into Lebanon.
“In this context, elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing, serves to legitimize and normalize these ongoing atrocities.”
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s director emeritus, called the statement “completely ridiculous.”
“You can’t present the narrative of your experience without it being called ‘one sided,’” Seidler-Feller said. “There has to be a counter-story to persecution. Is there a counter-story to killing people?”
UCLA Hillel executive director Daniel Gold dismissed the criticism in Tuesday’s letter as antisemitic.
“Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel UCLA would like to apologize…for absolutely nothing,” he wrote in a statement. “Members of UCLA student government have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student and antisemitic.”
The USAC did not respond to a request for comment.
As college campuses across the country became a hotspot for pro-Palestinian activism following the Oct. 7 attack, UCLA, with an activist history and a large Jewish population, stood out as a major flashpoint. Its student encampment was the site of a riot in April 2024 and eventually cleared by police in riot gear.
The USAC has sided with pro-Palestinian protesters throughout. In a Feb. 2025 letter titled “We Are All SJP,” the USAC, which is democratically elected by the roughly 30,000-member UCLA student body, condemned Chancellor Julio Frenk’s suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. The letter referred to Israel only as “the Zionist state” or put the country’s name inside quotation marks.
The University of California has since been sued by the Department of Justice, which said that UCLA created a hostile work environment against Jewish and Israeli faculty in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
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Trump extends ceasefire with Iran, even after Iran balks at new round of negotiations
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would unilaterally extend the U.S.-Israeli ceasefire with Iran, even though Iran had not agreed to his conditions or even to return to the negotiating table.
Trump announced the decision on Truth Social just hours before the two-week-old deal was set to expire. Citing Iran’s “fractured” leadership, Trump wrote that he had been asked by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to “hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Islamabad, where talks were set to take place, was postponed indefinitely after Iran failed to confirm its participation in negotiations.
Trump added that the United States would maintain its naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, despite Iran’s repeated calls for the restrictions to be lifted.
The announcement marked a sharp departure from the president’s statements earlier in the day, telling CNBC that, if a deal was not made before the deadline, “I expect to be bombing.”
In a statement Tuesday, Sharif thanked Trump for his “gracious acceptance” of Pakistan’s request to extend the ceasefire, adding that the country would “continue its earnest efforts for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.”
The announcement adds to uncertain about the war’s future, including for Israelis who lived through six weeks of Iranian bombing, and renews questions about Trump’s commitment to achieving his war goals, which have varied and included blunting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, achieving regime change, and destroying Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles. He said earlier this week that he was asking Iran to limit its nuclear program for 20 years, five years longer than was required by the deal struck by Barack Obama in 2015. Trump exited that deal in 2018.
Last week, Trump announced a different ceasefire, between Israel and Lebanon, on Truth Social, contradicting Israel’s claim that the Iran ceasefire would not apply to its fighting with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed proxy in Lebanon.
Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire extension came during the night in Israel, after Israelis began their celebration of Independence Day. It drew criticism from one of his staunchest pro-Israel supporters, the Zionist Organization of America, whose national president Morton Klein said in a statement that “interminable delay is the standard Islamic Iranian regime negotiating tactic” and that acceding to it represented a victory for Iran. The statement did not mention Trump.
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Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’
(JTA) — Alan Dershowitz, the prominent pro-Israel attorney whose clients have included Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, announced on Monday that he was leaving the Democratic party and registering as a Republican.
Describing himself as a “lifelong Democrat,” Dershowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had decided to “bite the bullet and register as a Republican,” citing Democratic support for an arms embargo on Israel last week and the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric.
“There is no denying that the hard left, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party has moved from the fringe to the mainstream,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that “Republicans have their own antisemitic fringe, but for now it remains a fringe.”
The announcement formalized a political evolution for Dershowitz, who defended Trump during his first impeachment and has increasingly broken with Democrats over Israel in recent years.
In 2021, Dershowitz nominated Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Avi Berkowitz, Trump’s top Middle Eastern envoy during his first administration, for the Nobel Peace Prize over their hand in shaping the Abraham Accords.
Dershowitz — who has recently faced scrutiny over his ties to Epstein, and previously denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by one of Epstein’s accusers — panned the Democratic Party as the “most anti-Israel party in U.S. history” in the op-ed.
“I believe that the Democratic Party’s hostility to Israel represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that he intended to “work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate.”
Dershowitz’s comments are in line with Trump’s statements about Jews and the Democratic Party. He has repeatedly expressed amazement at how any Jews could vote for the Democrats considering his own record when it comes to Israel.
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