Not sure if this item says more about China or Israel
The Middle Kingdom's Middle East experts, including China's special envoy to the region, Sun Bigan, believe that this summer's Lebanese war between Iranian proxy Hezbollah and Israel has seriously weakened the Jewish State. Accordingly, energy-starved China sees little reason to alter its policy of strengthening relations with oil-rich Islamist Iran and its secular ally, Syria.
The clinical Chinese view is that Israel's failure to defeat Hezbollah (which is rearming under the noses of United Nations "peacekeepers" with Iranian-Syrian help) after 34 days of intense fighting and aerial bombardment was strategically important in terms of the damage done to Israel's deterrent power.
The war, according to Sun and specialists at Chinese think tanks, also painted Israel in the eyes of world opinion as a less than competent US pawn, plagued by internal problems and divisions, including corruption, class, religious and ethnic differences--the Chinese have taken notice of Israeli media reports of disproportionately high casualties among poorer Russian and Ethiopian immigrants--and exposed "old thinking" regarding borders and buffer zones. Sun is said to have told his Arab friends that Hezbollah's success in using rockets (including Chinese-made and -designed missiles) to effectively paralyze and depopulate northern Israel seriously undermined decades-old Israeli security arguments for the retention of supposedly strategic, contested lands, such as the Golan Heights captured from Syria during the June 1967 Middle East war.
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