In 2019, a Chinese state-run newspaper featured a cartoon of a reptilian George Soros that, as Jordyn Haime and Tuvia Gering put it, “could have easily come from the Nazi-favored tabloid Der Stürmer.” This hostility toward the Hungarian-born Jewish financier, Haime and Gering argue, comes not from the often-controversial activities of his Open Society Foundations, but from the pessimism he has expressed since 2016 about China’s economic future. To this pessimism, Soros has also added sharp criticism of Beijing’s totalitarian tendencies. The Communist country has struck back rhetorically, and appears to have few qualms about using anti-Semitism as a weapon:

Soros’s Jewish heritage has not gone unnoticed by Chinese commentators and policymakers, who, much like their Western and Russian counterparts, gleefully capitalize on anti-Semitic tropes to get their political messages across.

Most are smart enough not to say the quiet part out loud. But this is not something that can be said of Zhèng Ruòlín, a popular francophone journalist-turned-public intellectual who has been a correspondent for the Chinese state-run Wenhui Bao in Paris since the early 1990s and is very familiar with European anti-Semitism.

According to an article Zheng published on Guancha, a popular nationalist portal funded by the billionaire Eric Li, Xi Jinping’s China has accepted the challenge of leading mankind toward a Community of Shared Destiny. This has made it the number-one adversary of “transnational financial capital,” which, to him, is driven by Jews like Soros on their mission to establish a “world government” over which they will rule.

Racist nationalism finds an audience among China’s top officials as well. The core thesis of the Chinese economist Sòng Hóngbīng’s 2007 best-seller Currency Wars is that international, particularly American, financial markets were controlled by a global clique of Jewish bankers. Naturally, Soros’s villainy appears 39 times in the first installment of the series.

Robert Clark explains why the resumption of hostilities is both just and necessary:

These latest Israeli strikes come after weeks of consistent Palestinian provocation; they have repeatedly broken the terms of the cease-fire which they claimed they were so desperate for. There have been numerous [unsuccessful] bus bombings near Tel Aviv and Palestinian-instigated clashes in the West Bank. Fifty-nine Israeli hostages are still held in captivity.

In fact, Hamas and their Palestinian supporters . . . have always known that they can sit back, parade dead Israeli hostages live on social media, and receive hundreds of their own convicted terrorists and murderers back in return. They believed they could get away with the October 7 pogrom.

One hopes Hamas’s leaders will get the message. Meanwhile, many inside and outside Israel seem to believe that, by resuming the fighting, Jerusalem has given up on rescuing the remaining hostages. But, writes Ron Ben-Yishai, this assertion misunderstands the goals of the present campaign. “Experience within the IDF and Israeli intelligence,” Ben-Yishai writes, “has shown that such pressure is the most effective way to push Hamas toward flexibility.” He outlines two other aims:

The second objective was to signal to Hamas that Israel is not only targeting its military wing—the terror army that was the focus of previous phases of the war up until the last cease-fire—but also its governance structure. This was demonstrated by the targeted elimination of five senior officials from Hamas’s political and civilian administration. . . . The strikes also served as a message to mediators, particularly Egypt, that Israel opposes Hamas remaining in any governing or military capacity in post-war Gaza.

The third objective was to create intense military pressure, coordinated with the U.S., on all remaining elements of the Shiite “axis of resistance,” including Yemen’s Houthis, Hamas, and Iran.