In the past few years, even as Washington has become increasingly wary of Beijing, Riyadh has signed a series of multi-billion-dollar trade and investment deals with Communist China. Currently China is a major importer of Saudi oil, and it is eager to invest in the kingdom as part of its massive infrastructure project in the Middle East and Africa. Therefore, writes Ilan Berman, the Saudis do not share American concerns about growing Chinese influence:

Today, officials in Riyadh are quick to portray China as a benign—indeed, benevolent—geopolitical and economic actor, and just as eager to downplay the potential pitfalls of closer engagement with Beijing. Behind that depiction lies a sober calculus: that Chinese capital is needed to grease the wheels of the rapid economic and political changes now taking place within the kingdom. . . . Yet it is equally clear that China’s deepening presence could leave an indelible mark on the House of Saud in at least two ways.

First, it has started to threaten the kingdom’s moral standing in the Muslim world. That’s because, despite the position of religious authority that has been carefully curated and cultivated by the House of Saud over the past century, Saudi officials are failing to speak out forcefully against the Chinese government’s abuses of their coreligionists in the western province of Xinjiang. To the contrary, when they have weighed in on the subject, Saudi leader have tended to strike a deferential attitude toward Beijing’s policies. . . . In February 2019, the Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Sultan went so far as to mount a defense of these policies, saying that China “has a right to carry out anti-terrorism and de-extremization work for its national security.”

Second, the kingdom’s growing proximity to China could adversely impact its older and more enduring partnership with the United States. Today, worries over China’s changing global role are a rare subject of bipartisan agreement in a polarized Washington. . . . Yet . . . this mounting unease is still poorly understood and largely unappreciated within the kingdom.

That, however, is a potentially grave mistake. The 75-year-old relationship between Riyadh and Washington is today at a unique inflection point. Changes in the region, and in the kingdom itself, make a “paradigm shift” in ties necessary, Saudi opinion-shapers say. But these same factors also require that Riyadh take Washington’s concerns about China seriously if the partnership is to prosper.

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.