Raise a Middle East policy issue during a meeting of Western diplomats and academics, and there is little doubt that a long and heated debate would ensue; it would include references to European imperialism and anti-Semitism, the Crusades and the Holocaust, Islamophobia and the Israel Lobby, democracy and the relationship between religion and state, not to mention several detailed plans to resolve the conflict in the Holy Land. Bring up the same issue during a discussion between Chinese officials and intellectuals, and much of the focus of a relatively brief and calm exchange would be on traditional foreign-policy considerations: the region’s energy resources, its strategic location, the relationship between its major states, the influence of outside powers and maybe an allusion to the latest Israeli-Palestinian surge in violence.
Indeed, American foreign-policy experts who visit Beijing are surprised by the almost detached and calculated analysis of the developments in the area of the world that their Chinese counterparts refer to sometimes as “West Asia.” With close to one hundred years of almost obsessive preoccupation by the West with the conflict between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East—and with half a century of U.S. diplomatic hyperactivism and military intervention in the region—Americans seem to exhibit what psychologists refer to as “projection bias,” ascribing their own fixation with the Middle East to the Chinese. Read More
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