Israel is a US military proxy that enjoys US support because of the influence of wealthy Jews, Chinese government-affiliated English-language news channel CGTN said Tuesday in a video posted online.
In a video titled “Why does the US act as a diplomatic shield for Israel?” presenter Zheng Junfeng floated a version of the theory, found in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other antisemitic tracts, that Jews control government policies by nefarious means.
The video opened by describing China’s anger with the US for blocking a UN Security Council resolution against Israel this week and questioning why successive US presidents have supported Israel.
“Some people believe that US pro-Israel policy is traceable to the influence of wealthy Jews in the US and the Jewish lobby on US foreign-policy-makers,” Zheng said.
The CGTN presenter said there are “over five million Jewish people in the US,” and that 18 of the top 40 people on the Forbes World’s Billionaires List are Jewish.
There are, in fact, more than seven million Jews in the US, and eight of the Forbes top 40 richest people are Jewish, by The Jerusalem Post’s count. Also, the Forbes list is of billionaires around the world and not just in the US.
The discrepancy may be an apparent attempt to make Jewish influence seem even more disproportionate and therefore ill-begotten.
“Jews dominate finance, media and Internet sectors,” Zheng said. “So, do they have powerful lobbies like some say? Possibly.”
Zheng then reversed his theory and posited that Israel is an American puppet.
“The US [has] used Israel as an instrument for advancing geopolitical interest in the Middle East since the 1960s,” he said.
The CGTN presenter described the 1967 Six Day War as follows: “The self-proclaimed Jewish state defeated Arab nationalism in the June war. Arab nationalism is the idea that the Middle East should exist for Arabs, not Jewish settlers and US oil companies.”
“Apparently the US did not like that idea, and Israel did a great service to Washington and US oil interests,” he added. “Ever since then, Israel has become a US beachhead.”
Zheng said Israel “functioned as a US proxy when [the] Pentagon was constrained by US law.”
The video was tweeted by CGTN, which has 13.5 million Twitter followers. The channel is owned by Chinese state media China Central Television, which is under the Chinese Communist Party’s Propaganda Department.
Why is Israel's government letting a country whose state media unabashedly promotes antisemitism build our infrastructure? https://t.co/8qzjNtFVp0 pic.twitter.com/wMWHSGjoEj
— Lahav Harkov (@LahavHarkov) May 19, 2021
Asked whether Chinese government supports the antisemitic conspiracy theory promulgated by the video, the Chinese Embassy in Israel said: “On the current tensions, there are many different voices in media reporting around the world.”
The Chinese government’s position is that “a ceasefire and stop of violence is the most pressing task,” the Chinese Embassy said. “China strongly condemns violence against civilians, and we urge the parties of the conflict to immediately cease military actions and hostilities and stop such moves as airstrikes, ground offensives and rocket launches that aggravate the situation.”
The Israeli Embassy in China said it was “appalled to see blatant antisemitism” on Chinese state media and that any media spreading these ideas should be ashamed.
“We have hoped that the times of the ‘Jews controlling the world’ conspiracy theories were over,” the Israeli Embassy said. “The claims expressed in the video are racist and dangerous... Claiming that the Jews as a people have control over other governments is outrageous... We are disappointed to see these types of messages and urge CGTN to take down this insulting video that spreads lies and racism.”
Israel, the Jewish State, is not the result of a conspiracy, the embassy said; rather, it is “a right of the Jewish people.”
The US and other countries support Israel in the current conflict “because they also believe that Israel has the right to protect itself, as does any country in the world. Not as a part of an antisemitic ploy as expressed in the video,” the Israeli Embassy tweeted.
Carice Witte, executive director of SIGNAL, which studies Sino-Israel ties, said the video was a way for China to try to justify “its consistent policy that the Palestinian-Israel conflict is the core problem in the Middle East, while garnering support from UN voting nations for Chinese domestic policies from a growing cohort of radical-left voices around the world.”
Witte compared the video and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s comments against Israel at the UN Security Council to China signing a 25-year, $400 billion strategic partnership with Iran earlier this year, saying that they “are primarily about its rivalry with the US; Israel is collateral damage.”