China’s Offer to Mediate in the Israel-Palestine Conflict Is Overstated – For Now

THE DIPLOMAT

Last week, the media was abuzz when Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang indicated his interest in helping mediate the Israel-Palestine conflict by speaking to both the Israeli and Palestinian foreign ministers. This generated some discussion as to whether China was looking to build on the success of its hosting of talks between Iran and Saudi Arabia last month, which led to their re-establishing diplomatic relations after several years of rivalry and tension.

However, just as the Iran-Saudi Arabia talks should not be overstated, neither should the Chinese offer to mediate between Israel and the Palestinians. Indeed, the proposal was not new; Chinese officials have made similar proposals in the past. And when it has hosted talks between the two sides, China has not had any substantive impact — as happened last time in December 2017, when a senior Palestinian delegation met a more modest Israeli one in Beijing and both sides struggled to agree to anything more than a non-binding resolution.

Perhaps the greatest challenges facing successful Chinese mediation is the nature of the conflict and the peace process around it.

First, the conflict is an asymmetrical one, in which one party, Israel, has imposed what activist and scholar Jeff Halper calls a “matrix of control” over the Palestinians. By this he means that Israel holds both military and administrative control over the occupied Palestinian territory and the movement of Palestinians within it. Along with the nearly 20-year siege of Gaza, successive Israeli governments have allowed nearly 500,000 Jewish settlers to take up residence in the West Bank while building a parallel road system that connects the settlements to Israel and breaking up Palestinian territorial contiguity.

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