The Deprogram

China have a consistent policy. They recognize the state of Palestine and vote for its membership in the UN.

China want to mediate a peaceful resolution. To achieve that, they will not distance themselves from or sanction Israel. They can't be an effective mediator otherwise.

They only use trade sanctions in RETALIATION to attacks on China from other countries.

Sanctions aren't going to beat Israel. It's supported by the US with billions of dollars per year.

Do you at least harbor some amount of disappointment for how little China has distanced themselves from “Israel”?

Any disappointment I may have had is because of leftover liberalism ie my own ignorance and ineptitude. My own anger comes from how little has been done by the peoples collectively as westerners/vassal states.

The likes of Soviet Union and Cuba has done things that should jam more with western mores of what "socialism" is outside of their borders and they fucking suffered for it AND don't get the credit they deserved.

Their peoples died en masse for the world so the rest of us can write fucking memes.

Whereas the one country that learned what that overleverage costs is the only reason we are talking here today about a realistic end of Western Hegemony. Marxism-leninism is a science and we are so backwards that we do not have the courtesy of humanity to learn it.

Or, maybe you reject the entire premise and DO think that China has been effectively browbeating “Israel”?

I suspect they are but I want to currently submit to the concrete evidence we do have rather than the speculation of what may be likely (ie high impact but low visbility eg dual use metal export ban).

The simple answer is the US is orders of magnitude worse than Israel and if one understands despite that China had to trade with the US and is avoiding hot war with it then it is telling when folks not get why the same should extend elsewhere of said hegemony. If one wants to downplay the only country to drop nuclear bombs on civilians twice then that is on them to take that risk not China's.

I think rainpizza put it the best here: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10742177/7761032

To enforce that economic blockade, you have to declare war to the entire West and decouple completely from the Western system(USD, SWIFT, Maritime Shipping Routes, et all).

As long as the West is willing to save their Zionist dog by bleeding their economies dry, there is no viable way to do an economic blockade without a military siege.

The problem with people here is that they see the entity as something separate rather than something within the Western system. To eradicate Israel, you have to destroy the West.

(bold emphasis mine)

In other words, we cannot take the western empire out of the picture and try to understand China's dealings with israel as dealing with a purely sovereign, independent entity (because that's not what it is). We have to understand it in relation to israel's dependence on / connection with the US. When we put it in that way, it's easier I think to understand that the question is not one of distancing from israel, but distancing from the west, and actively doing that is a valid choice for an AES state to make but it's not the path China took when they focused on building up their productive forces and becoming the productive powerhouse that they now are. For them to go a different way has much broader implications than trade with any one nation and needs to make sense in the context of how they're engaging with unipolar capitalism and the dynamics of global trade in order to develop toward multipolar. Were they equipped to reject the west and its genocidal ways on a broader scale, I would expect that israel would only be the tip of the iceberg and they would have a million excuses to do so with the way the west treats them and others.

So then the question becomes why? The cynical ultra-left view seems to be something like that they're not rejecting the west because they benefit from the trade deals or something. But the west wants to undermine them no matter how they try to work for mutual benefit and the evidence points to them still being thoroughly led by communist principles. So the ultra-left view doesn't make sense. You have to essentially believe they are either stupid or compromised on a large scale, while still putting on a face like they aren't, both of which reek of racism that the Chinese people are incapable of recognizing internal threats and acting competently.

I think the ML answer is that the west wants to isolate and encircle them, always has, and China does not (yet) have the power to cut the west out, rather than be cut out by the west, if it comes to that; in bits and pieces maybe, and we saw some of that in the way China handled the attempted browbeating from the US with tariffs. But I think it's still in a fragile rather than well-established state. And until the balance of power shifts enough away from western economic dominance, China playing fast and loose with rejecting trade partners means cutting themselves out of deals that could broaden their influence and weaken the west's. This after they have worked really hard to forge the trade connections they have in the world.

I could imagine a counter argument regarding proxies going something like: Well what about Ukraine with Russia? Russia intervened militarily in Ukraine, in spite of it being a proxy of the west. But Ukraine wasn't always a proxy, it took a long time for all out war to happen including from the west sabotaging peace deal efforts, including from Ukraine being an aggressor in the donbass, and this in the context of Ukraine being near Russia. The closest comparison for China would probably be when the US was openly at war in Korea, the Korean liberation forces were trying to fight them back and they asked for help from China and China of the time stepped in militarily. It was not only a matter of helping those in need, but it would have also been dangerous for them to have the US knocking on their doorstep next.

What's happening to Palestine is unquestionably horrific, but it's also far from the first time the west has done genocidal things. I think it seems unprecedented in its way largely because of how televised in real-time a genocide it has been. But the destruction itself is already characteristic of colonialism for hundreds of years and the imperialism form that developed after. If China treated it like an anomalous level of evil that has never been done before and threw massive weight behind trying to stop it as a result, they would be ignoring everything else the west has gotten away with and how important it is to ensure its power falls as a whole, not just through one proxy.

Is there a better way than what they are doing? Maybe analysis would show there is, I don't know. But there are other countries and peoples who are more closely positioned to oppose what's going on, namely those in the west, whose trade deals and leadership actively manufacture support for genocide day in and day out.