Why Some Chinese are Pro-Israel on Palestinian–Israeli conflict?

As victims of the Holocaust, the Jews in Israel internalized the perpetrators' logic and became the mirror image of the Nazis. Many studies have proved this point. The concept of a "national state," invented by the West, is a concept of "soil and blood." The Nazis wanted to eliminate Jews due to an extreme deduction of this concept in the 19th century. Its logic is that "this is our Aryan country, and the Jews should go out because you do not belong here." Zionism has fully absorbed this concept and believes that "we must have our land, and it is "only" our land." Once part of the Palestine region was granted to Jews to return, they started to exclude Arab and occupy the land of the whole area.

Even though the Chinese government is always standing with Palestine, we surprisingly see a considerable amount of people are pro-Israel on Chinese social media. One main reason is that pop culture is always creating impressions such as "Jews and Chinese are the smartest people in the world," "Jews and Chinese are both ancient civilizations with a long history," and so on.  At the same time, the discourse about the "third world" is fading. Under the narrative of anti-terrorism after 9.11, we no longer talk about the anti-imperialist and anti-colonialism in the third world, the revolution of the third world, or the friendship of the third world, which was the main narrative in China for a long time.  Chinese gradually set the sights on the West and entered the imagination of Israel's freedom and democracy.  The majority of Chinese do not know anything about Israel. Israel is too far away from freedom and democracy.  However, pop culture continues to construct the discourse that Israel is the only democracy and modern society in the Middle East. 

The support for Israel in mainland China is even beyond the imagination of free democracies. On the one hand, many people just simply worship the strong military and advanced technology. On the other hand, there is a large-scale anti-Muslim atmosphere in China, which contains a high level of racism and religious discrimination.  Even today, when China's domestic public opinion field is so anti-American (which should be naturally transferred to anti-Israel), we surprisingly see many people firmly support Israel instead. 

There are huge changes from the revolutionary era to the post-revolutionary era behind this phenomenon.  When we are engaging with the world today, we use the logic of realism, which means that when we consider the relationship with any country, the first thing we consider is the national interest.  For example, Israel will sell us some high-tech equipment, thus Israel becomes an ideal strategic partner for China.  In the revolutionary era, this logic was seldomly adopted. People only talked about how one class can overthrow the ruling class in the world revolution. 

Another very big reason is that the world has to constantly deal with the Western context and intermediary, and China is not an exception. Not only about the Middle East, sometimes it is difficult for Chinese to understand Japan and South Korea in detail because we do not master their languages. We have to understand them through Western English intermediaries. However, on issues like Palestine and Israel, the Western always has the historical burden of the Jewish Holocaust.  It has become a moral capital of Israel, constantly making Europeans feel guilty. The western media are too afraid to criticize Israel. The logic of some Europeans is that to support Palestine is to oppose Israel, and to oppose Israel is anti-Semitism. Also, because some Jews elites are high profile in the English media, we can never learn the situation objectively from the English mainstream media.

Since the mainstream media disproportionally report the conflicts, most of the critics on Israel only happened on social media. Moreover, this is even more difficult for Chinese people to engage because China has a 'great fire wall' that blocked FB, Twitter, Instagram, and almost all other international social media. The images and video clips widely circulated on foreign social media seldomly reposted to Chinese social media, making the Chinese unaware of what is exactly is going on there, and few Chinese can show empathy on it. I am sad about this when I see people worldwide protesting on the street to support Palestine, but it is very quiet on China's side. It is also the same case on lots of other issues. For example, when the BLM movement was worldwide, even the Japanese and Korean were protesting to support George Floyd, but Chinese people seem separated from the rest of the world. I am afraid that this kind of separation will keep happening until China, and the West will not understand each other at all.