Interested Parties

"When people are being murdered, slaughtered in the streets, this is not the time to call for a two-state solution," said Yuval Waks, an Israeli official in Beijing, adding that Israel expected China to offer "stronger condemnation" of the attacks.

In claiming neutrality, China picks a side in Israel-Hamas war

The remainder of the Axios piece goes on to lay out how China is looking out for its own interests in the current conflict; namely, by position themselves as an unbiased third party (read: somewhat more supportive of Palestinian/Arab interests) in a way that they claim (likely accurately, as far as I'm concerned) that the United States is not.

I will admit to being curious as to what was meant by the expectation that Beijing would offer "stronger condemnation" of the Hamas attack on Israel, given that past condemnations of international violence seemed to have been completely ineffective in preventing this current outbreak of violence. Does anyone even remember what these sorts of performative declarations even say after six months?

There is an interesting habit that one notices in these sorts of things, where nations seem to expect that other nations stop attempting to advance their interests when something happens. The People's Republic of China sees an opening to push for greater alignment, if not outright alliance, with Arab (and other) nations in the Middle East who are to greater or lesser degrees, on the side of the Palestinians. (Whether that also means Hamas is a different, and only somewhat related, question.) People are capable of holding grudges for a very long time, and for much of "the Arab street," the state of Israel sits on land that should be a state of Palestine. The fact that it's been there for a few generations now is beside the point. One doesn't need to have a political science degree to understand that it's good for Chinese influence in the area for them to be seen as something of an ally to the Palestinian cause (quixotic as that cause may be). And so that's what they're doing.

Purportedly, the People's Republic of China considers the the Unites States of America as the single biggest obstacle to it becoming the world-leading global power that it feels it deserves to become. Whether or not that is actually the case within the halls of the Chinese government, I have no idea... after all, everything I know about the workings of the Chinese government is third hand, at best. But if one takes that statement as true, however, a lot of the actions that China is taking, especially as pertains to attempts to reduce the influence of the United States in international affairs, make sense.

Nation-states, rarely, if ever, have incentives to place the interests of other nations ahead of their own. Being seen to work for an end to the conflict that offers the best deal for the people of Palestine is simply China acting in accordance with it's own national interests. After all, if they are successful in, say, having a Palestinian state created, one can guess who they will side with in future international disputes. Not to mention earning them points in the rest of the Islamic world. Israel's stated (if perhaps perfunctory) expectation that China not seek to capitalize on this is misplaced.