The People’s Republic of China has joined other countries in calling for Israel’s complete withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But Beijing refuses to accept that in the rest of the world, China is also seen as an occupier because of its control of Tibet.
Alfred Moses, president of the American Jewish Committee, made this comparison to Chinese officials during a recent visit to the Communist country by an AJCommittee delegation.
“I compared Tibet to the West Bank, and they said you can’t compare the two,” Moses said during an interview in his Washington law office.
When the Chinese maintained that the people in Tibet enjoy greater human rights than they did under the Dalai Lama, Moses said he replied, “I’ve heard that before.”
He explained to the Chinese that “the Israelis say there are more human rights and certainly far greater economic progress in the West Bank than there were under the Jordanians.
“Whatever the Israelis do in the West Bank, they are going to be criticized for it because they are seen as occupiers by the rest of the world, just as you are seen as an occupier in Tibet,” Moses told the Chinese.
He said they replied that Tibet is historically part of China.
“Israel has historical claims to the West Bank that go back 3,000 years,” Moses countered. “They are religious, they are historical and there’s also security components.”
He tried to explain to them that the “Arab claims to the territory have to be balanced against Israel’s security interest.”
But the Chinese refuse to accept this argument. Like much of the rest of the world, he said, “there is very little sympathy for Israel” in China.
The four-member AJCommittee delegation visited China less than three months after Beijing established diplomatic relations with Israel.
China did so because that was the “ticket” for participating in the multilateral negotiations on the Middle East, Moses said.
But the Jewish group told the Chinese that they had to broaden their relations with Israel to the full gamut of contacts.
Moses was accompanied to China by Mimi Alperin of New York, chairwoman of the group’s national executive council; Neil Sandberg, director of its Pacific Rim Institute in Los Angeles; and Stephen Lesser of Los Angeles, a member of the institute’s advisory board.
This was AJCommittee’s first visit to China. The organization has visited Japan 10 times and South Korea four times.
AJCommittee was scheduled to visit China in 1989, but it canceled the visit because of the Chinese government’s crackdown on young dissidents in Tiananmen Square.
“We pushed the human rights issue very hard” in all meetings with Chinese officials, Moses said.
The Chinese answer was that they could not let their country of 1.1 billion people disintegrate as has the Soviet Union. They stressed that their main concern is first stability and then economic development.
But unlike the Japanese and Koreans, whose view on the Middle East is basically economic because of their need for oil and markets, the Chinese do not need Middle East oil, Moses said.
Instead, the Chinese have taken basically a view of support for the Third World, which has also meant support for the Arabs. This many be changing now since the Chinese now realize their interests may differ from other Third World countries.
The Chinese officials said they have signed on to the Western view of not providing missiles and nuclear technology to the Middle East. They denied having shipped M-9 or M-11 missiles to Syria, although “it’s not so clear” about Iran, Moses said.
While the government officials in Beijing knew little about Jews, this was not true of the Chinese they met in Shanghai, where the Jewish ghetto that had served as a haven for many Jews during World War II is being preserved, Moses said.
He said there is a good deal of interest in Jewish history by Chinese intellectuals. “They tend to be admiring of Jews and identify with Jews as people who suffered in World War II as they did,” he explained.
They also point out that the Chinese and Jews are both known for their “business acumen,” called “the Jews of the Orient.”
There is also a Sino-Judaic Institute in Shanghai, which AJCommittee plans to work with and support.
For AJCommittee, the trips to Asian countries are a chance to explain to people who know little about Jews what the American Jewish community is all about, Moses said.
“We brought a presence to China,” he explained. “It is very important to bring to the Chinese physical evidence of American Jewry.”
Moses said the Chinese were given “some sense of who we are and what we are about.” This includes the significance of the American Jewish community in the United States and its effectiveness in bringing about changes on issues of concern to world Jewry, whether it be the emigration of Soviet Jewry, helping to put an end to the Arab boycott or support for Israel.
AJCommittee wants the Chinese to learn that American Jews are an influential group and a factor in world politics and to reinforce that notion incrementally, Moses said.
“This was not our last trip to China,” he said. “We expect to have an ongoing relationship.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
