Israel-Muslim World Relations Under China’s Watch

Despite the fact that many Arab and some non-Arab Muslim countries have diplomatically recognized Israel, their populations remain opposed to Israel’s role in global and regional politics. The populations of the Arab nations remain dead opposed to Zionism, the founding ideology of the state of Israel. They also remain opposed to Israel’s Palestinian land grab, atrocities against Palestinians and Israel’s denial of Muslim holy places to global Muslims. The Arab regimes, however, are for the most part, at ease with Israel under the pressure of Israel’s allies in the West. The non-Arab Muslim world has a greater number of countries that vehemently oppose Israel and its policies and are vocal about inhumanities of Zionism. However, all this was the configuration under Pax Britannica and Pax Americana. With the impending decline of the West vis-à-vis its economies and dwindling demographics, we witness the rise of China as a global economic and strategic powerhouse. Combined with Russia, their alliance forms a powerful challenge to the status quo powers, i.e., the West, of which Israel is a vital part. After all, Zionism was born in the West, and it was Britain that enabled the illegal installment of Israel in the heartland of the Muslim world. A risen China is now a superpower than the United States and its allies have to contend with. China believes in radically different set of norms than the Western world. China’s relationship with the Muslim world is radically different from that of the West. Its BRI plans depend by and large on the countries of the Muslim world and China today is busy developing its own tradition of studying Islam and Muslim societies and not having to rely on the Western knowledge on this topic. This, therefore, is likely to produce a different outlook on its relations with Israel in the coming future. China is just beginning to understand the geopolitics of the Abrahamic world. While its relations with Israel were not great in China’s early years of independence, from 1990s onwards, they began to thaw. After about a decade, however, now that China’s BRI is more dependent on the countries of the Islamic world rather than Israel, China is likely to recalibrate its relations with the Israelis. This means China may give less space to the Israelis inside China and in its global policy preferences, than it did during the decade of 2010–2020. This chapter will evaluate and analyze the recent trends in Chinese policy regarding Israel, spread and acceptance of political Zionism, and its policy on global Islamic civilizations in light of China’s civilization-state philosophy.