While Beijing insists officially that its rapidly growing involvement in the Middle East—arms sales, trade deals, technology-sharing agreements, and massive infrastructure projects—is purely economic and politically neutral, Ilan Berman discerns something more sinister. As an example, Berman points to the muted reactions of such Muslim rulers as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Saudi Arabia’s Muhammad bin Salman to China’s massive and brutal persecution of the Muslim Uighurs of its northwest, noting that China has invested heavily in both Turkey and Saudi Arabia:

[W]hen the region’s most influential leaders have chosen to weigh in on China’s anti-Muslim offensive, they have done so in support of Beijing, rather than in opposition to it. . . . The result is tantamount to an abandonment of Chinese Muslims by their Middle Eastern co-religionists for economic reasons. The signal sent to Beijing is that its domestic policies, no matter how repressive, will be considered off-limits for criticism or inspection so long as the price is right. That, in turn, is likely to fuel Beijing’s current offensive of forcing assimilation and subservience among its Muslim minority by any means necessary.

Arguably the most profound effect of China’s expanding presence in the Middle East, however, has been its adverse impact on governance throughout the region. Today, the digitally enabled authoritarianism that China’s government has used to great effect to reshape its own society in a more rigid, censored, and compliant direction has begun to proliferate in the countries of the Middle East. Most blatantly, Chinese companies have long helped Iran’s clerical regime to repress its own people, [sometimes] doing so in violation of U.S. sanctions.

Egypt has similarly allowed the PRC to obtain a major stake in its communications sector and to disseminate technologies that have strengthened President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s grip on power at the expense of freedom of expression there. . . . Other regional states could soon head in the same direction. . . . The “China model” of social control could thus easily become an export commodity in Beijing’s dealings with the Middle East—much to the detriment of prospects for pluralism and democracy in the region.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.