Last week, the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas took a four-day trip to China. There he met with Xi Jinping, who affirmed his interest in “playing a greater role in promoting internal reconciliation in Palestine and realizing peace in the Middle East.” The two also concluded agreements on economic and technological cooperation and announced that their relations would be upgraded to a “strategic partnership.” Jordyn Haime comments:

Abbas’s visit was largely symbolic and more about China affirming its position in the Middle East and on the global stage rather than brokering a realistic peace deal.

Xi offered to mediate Israeli-Palestine peace talks and put forward a three-point proposal that advocates an independent Palestinian state based on pre-1967 borders with east Jerusalem as its capital, more economic support for Palestinians, and a continued peace process. He also expressed interest in playing an “active part” in intra-Palestinian reconciliation, [which would involve] groups like Hamas or Hizballah that China has refused to treat as terrorist organizations.

“China is biased, contrary to [the image] it would like to portray,” [the expert on Chinese Middle East policy] Tuvia Gering said. “It absolves Palestinians of agency and responsibility for the conflict, fails to grasp local dynamics, and ignores Israel’s security challenges in its battle against terrorism.”

The first clause in a five-point joint declaration issued by both sides last week affirmed that the Palestinian Authority adheres to the one-China principle and supports China’s policies in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. “Xinjiang-related issues are not human-rights issues, but issues of anti-terrorism, de-radicalization, and anti-separatism. The Palestinian side firmly opposes using Xinjiang-related issues as an excuse to interfere with Chinese internal affairs,” it read.

Commenting on the hearings of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday about anti-Semitism on college campuses, and the dismaying testimony of three university presidents, Jonah Goldberg writes:

If some retrograde poltroon called for lynching black people or, heck, if they simply used the wrong adjective to describe black people, the all-seeing panopticon would spot it and deploy whatever resources were required to deal with the problem. If the spark of intolerance flickered even for a moment and offended the transgendered, the Muslim, the neurodivergent, or whomever, the fire-suppression systems would rain down the retardant foams of justice and enlightenment. But calls for liquidating the Jews? Those reside outside the sensory spectrum of the system.

It’s ironic that the term colorblind is “problematic” for these institutions such that the monitoring systems will spot any hint of it, in or out of the classroom (or admissions!). But actual intolerance for Jews is lathered with a kind of stealth paint that renders the same systems Jew-blind.

I can understand the predicament. The receptors on the Islamophobia sensors have been set to 11 for so long, a constituency has built up around it. This constituency—which is multi-ethnic, non-denominational, and well entrenched among students, administrators, and faculty alike—sees Israel and the non-Israeli Jews who tolerate its existence as an affront to their worldview and Muslim “identity.” . . . Blaming the Jews for all manner of evils, including the shortcomings of the people who scapegoat Jews, is protected because, at minimum, it’s a “personal truth,” and for some just the plain truth. But taking offense at such things is evidence of a mulish inability to understand the “context.”

Shocking as all that is, Goldberg goes on to argue, the anti-Semitism is merely a “symptom” of the insidious ideology that has taken over much of the universities as well as an important segment of the hard left. And Jews make the easiest targets.