Using phrases that seem more characteristic of West European governments, the Chinese foreign minister and other officials stridently condemned Israel during its most recent round of fighting with Hamas. Some diplomats even made anti-Semitic comments about sinister Jewish influence. As Beijing has never even made a show of prioritizing human rights in its foreign policy, and has robust economic ties with the Jewish state, this hostility came as a surprise. Ilan Berman and Joshua Eisenman seek to explain this about-face:

Part of the answer can be found in China’s increasingly desperate efforts to shift the international conversation away from its ongoing genocide against Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang. By supporting the plight of the Palestinians, China is cynically stoking the most emotional issue in Middle Eastern politics in order to distract Muslim nations from its own domestic campaign to “break the lineage and roots” of Chinese Muslims via an extensive system of gulags.

At the same time, Beijing’s expanding investments throughout the Middle East in recent years (in arenas ranging from Lebanon’s telecom sector to assorted infrastructure projects in Egypt) have effectively bought the silence of Muslim governments when it comes to Chinese human-rights abuses. [And] China’s sprawling 25-year strategic pact with Iran is the centerpiece of its Mideast strategy.

China’s response to Israel’s recent conflict with Hamas should serve as a wake-up call for policymakers in Jerusalem. It highlights the fact that, despite its extensive financial stake, . . . there are real limits to China’s alignment with Israel. Indeed, the Israeli government’s recent backing of a Canadian-sponsored UN resolution on the Xinjiang genocide suggests that a rethink on China policy may already be under way.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].