Beijing's Elite Capture in Israel and the Rewriting of History

China uses Israeli lawmakers and business elites to turn reality on its head

by Tuvia Gering | February 5, 2026

On Tuesday, the Israeli Knesset hosted a forum titled “Strengthening Israel-China Relations and Marking the Spring Festival.” Hosted by MK Akram Hasson (New Hope party, under Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar) and Ambassador Dr. Xiao Junzheng, the event was initiated by the Chinese embassy and organized in cooperation with Hasson.

During the proceedings, Hasson publicly thanked China for being “among the few countries that condemned the massacre and what happened on October 7,” claiming that China “supported us and stood by our side.” Hasson went on to describe China as one of the few countries that "did not allow" 20,000 Chinese workers to leave, and even made the admirable but ridiculous suggestion that China relocate its embassy to the capital, Jerusalem.

These assertions are radically misleading. They invert the documented reality of China’s conduct during Israel’s most severe crisis in generations.

The Reality of “Standing by Israel”

China did not and does not stand with Israel after October 7. Instead, it aligned with Israel’s adversaries and treated Hamas with political indulgence.

China’s first unambiguous, on-the-record condemnation of the October 7 massacre did not occur until May 10, 2025. This was a pre-recorded, “softball” interview with Ambassador Xiao for an obscure Israeli podcast in English, delivered 581 days after the attack. It was an isolated event, held in a controlled setting, following 18 months in which China repeatedly condemned Israel in international forums and still does.

Chinese diplomats now quietly claim to Israeli lawmakers that “China condemned October 7 early.” This is an attempt to seed a false history. Prove me wrong, but you won’t because you can’t; there are no links or records to support this claim because it did not happen.

On the contrary, in February 2024, China’s Foreign Ministry legal advisor, Ma Xinmin, argued before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for 30 minutes that Palestinian violence against Israel’s “colonial repression” is not terrorism but a “legitimate armed struggle” and an “inalienable right well founded in international law.”

In July 2024, China’s Foreign Ministry hosted an official Hamas delegation for “reconciliation talks,” granting the terrorist organization more international legitimacy. Also in July, when China finally did condemn something, it was the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh by Israel in Tehran.

China’s Role in Diplomatic and Information Warfare Against Israel

At every turn at the UNSC, UNHRC, and General Assembly, China consistently pushed resolutions and votes targeting Israel, strong-arming it into “unconditional ceasefires.” China-led or supported lawfare pressured for outcomes that ignored Israel’s core security concerns and legitimate interests while working procedurally to shape the global agenda against the Jewish state.

Parallel to this, Chinese party-state media and state-backed influence ecosystems, including the MPS-attributed “Spamoflage” disinformation campaign, fed a global narrative portraying Israel as the primary aggressor. This machine weaponized the conflict to instigate anti-US messaging while normalizing and amplifying disinformation and misinformation by Hamas and the Iran-backed Axis of Resistance.

This was reinforced by Chinese diplomats and academic figures who, on the record, trafficked in antisemitic tropes and extreme delegitimization and dehumanization, comparing Israel to Nazi Germany and the Imperial Japanese Army, amplifying conspiracies about “Jewish control,” insofar as justifying terror attacks against Jewish targets.

Tuvia Gering 陶文亚@GeringTuvia

"The US-led Western world must swallow the bitter fruit of having indulged Israel in reviving the 'law of the jungle' in the Middle East" -Ma Xiaolin & Yang Fuxin frame the Bondi attack using one of history's oldest tropes:blaming Jews for the violence perpetrated against them.

Tuvia Gering 陶文亚 @GeringTuvia

Prof Chen Hong, Director of the Australian Studies Centre at East China Normal University, claims Canberra bears "unavoidable responsibility" for the Bondi terror attack against the Jewish community, which killed 15 people, due to its support for Israel and the US. Full quote:

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At the same time, Chinese universities, peer-reviewed journals, and major platforms routinely censored or marginalized any views that could present Israel, or even Jews, in a positive light, ensuring that incitement and demonization faced far fewer constraints.

Business delegations were ground to a halt, tourists too, even though there were direct flights (and this is truly something that should be said to the embassy’s credit); academic cooperations ceased, including the shutting down of a Chinese university campus in Petach Tikvah and the cessation of the joint national science funds of Israel and China.

Furthermore, until recently, China rarely mentioned the 251 hostages, much less advocated for their unconditional release. Hearing Ambassador Xiao discuss last week’s retrieval by Israel of the last hostage, Ran Gvili, and the “Israeli spirit” makes me cringe. When China referenced them at all, it often used the term “detainees” 被扣押人员. This language mirrored Hamas propaganda and was designed to create a false equivalence between Israeli civilians, children, and the elderly, abducted from their homes, and convicted Palestinian terrorists held in Israeli prisons.

China’s embassy rebuffed repeated requests to help secure the release of Noa Argamani, including appeals from her family and a direct request conveyed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Chinese officials reportedly cited the fact that Argamani was only “half Chinese” through her mother and declined to take any meaningful action.

China’s lack of solidarity was also evident in its physical absence. There is no public record of the ambassador or his predecessor visiting the affected kibbutzim in the south. Notably, the embassy has made zero mention of the four Chinese citizens murdered in cold blood by invading Hamas forces on October 7. These omissions keep the narrative clean and detached from Israeli grief, ensuring it is easier to frame Palestinians as the exclusive victims.

Outgoing Israeli Ambassador to Beijing, Irit Ben-Abba, recently confirmed that the “tsunami” of antisemitic and anti-Israel discourse on Chinese platforms was a deliberate, top-down political choice. Speaking to reporter Itamar Eichner, she stated that Beijing’s posture “dictated harshly critical messages across every possible platform” while “hundreds of posts from the embassy and consulates were censored.” She was blunt: if Beijing had wanted to stop the poison, it could have, because public discourse in China is “supervised, guided, and directed” (her full remarks were kindly shared with me by Itamar).

Strategic Opportunism

October 7 provided Beijing with a low-risk opportunity to curry favor with the Arab world, the Global South, and “progressive forces” in the West. The tactic is as old as Lenin: identify societies under strain, amplify internal divisions, and cultivate coalitions of groups that share a hostility toward the “US-led West.”

Under this “United Front” logic, Beijing poses as a champion to anti-imperialists, far-left Maoists, and even the antisemitic fringes of the far right. In this framing, Israel was meant to be isolated and pressured into an unconditional ceasefire while its hostages remained to rot in Gaza.

Why is Beijing pivoting now, or, to be exact, been gradually pivoting since October 2024?

Reality did not cooperate with China’s script. Israel’s battlefield victories, the demise of Assad, the degradation of Hezbollah, and Israel’s 12-day thrashing of Iran have reshaped the region. This has increased American pressure on the Iranian regime, which China STILL funds and shields, despite its butchering of estimated tens of thousands of its citizens.

There is no moral awakening, and it ain’t personal, either. It’s good-ol’ Chinese transactional realism. My real issue has been for many a year with Israeli lawmakers and how influence can be purchased within Israel’s democratic system for a pottage of lentils.

The playbook is old and tattered: Target low-profile lawmakers with minimal China literacy; host “unforgettable” lavish dinners at the ambassador’s residence, as they described them at the event this week; promise the moon and make modest donations of office supplies and a goodwill visits to an MK’s hometown, such as Hasson’s Daliyat al-Karmel; turn these MKs into “ambassadors” of friendship who repeat Beijing’s talking points in the Knesset.

Et voila! A foreign embassy does not need to resort to graft when it can outsource its messaging to oblivious elected officials who believe they are merely “building bridges.” As the meme goes, in Communist China, the bridges build you.

One outcome of this event was that the public-diplomacy organization Beit Israel, led by Israeli-Georgian businessman and MK Hasson’s associate Itzik Moshe, announced plans to open a “representative office” in China to “tell the Israel story well,” or something to that effect. This initiative is not overseen by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, which in the past had issues with Moshe’s activities in Georgia, where he reportedly stepped on a few toes before later smoothing things over.

There is no reason to doubt that Moshe’s intentions are well-meaning, and there is indeed a clear need for stronger Israeli public diplomacy in the PRC and elsewhere. But if this initiative does materialize, and that is a big if, the obvious question is what China stands to gain in return, beyond another unregulated channel that bypasses formal state oversight and operates through moneyed elites. We were already heading down this path just before the war, when the Public Diplomacy Minister Galit Distel-Atbaryan echoed Chinese talking points almost verbatim, promoted joint programs with Chinese state propagandists, and pledged to disseminate Beijing’s narratives inside Israel.

Stabilizing Israel-China relations on a sober, interest-based footing is necessary, and on that front, I fully align with MK Akram’s approach. There are millions and millions of compelling reasons why it is in both countries’ interests for our bilateral ties to stabilize, rebound, and grow. Our ambassador in Beijing echoed this sentiment earlier this week in an op-ed for Xinhua News Agency, extolling the ties between our two ancient civilizations.

Let cooler heads prevail, but a steady relationship must not be built on lies. If Chinese diplomats, and Israeli lawmakers for that matter, want better relations, they must work for today and tomorrow, without inventing a history of solidarity that never existed.

Since I know embassy staff read my articles, do take note: every attempt to distort the record will be another opportunity to set it straight. We remember that in Israel’s darkest hour, China chose to stand with our enemies.

Tuvia Gering is a cyber-threat intelligence analyst at Planet Nine’s Digital Intelligence Team, a visiting fellow at the Israel-China Policy Center at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), and a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the author’s affiliated organizations.

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