'In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinian', thousands demonstrate in Washington, London, Berlin, Dakar.

Medical facilities on the brink of collapse and ambulances in Gaza are being targeted directly by Israeli attacks.

They called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and pledged to stand by Palestine 'until final victory'.

A doctor says he felt a "big relief" on arriving at Heathrow after fleeing the war-torn region.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

People all over the world are divided about the best way forward in the Middle East. As conflict devastates that region, how should citizens outside the Middle East handle their differences of opinion about the best way forward without tearing their societies apart?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

In Spiegel International, under the headline “Middle East Conflict Tests the Postwar World Order,” a piece with six bylines advances a theory of geopolitics and poses a series of questions:

In Germany, which bears “historic responsibility for the worst imaginable crime,” as Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said in her UN speech in reference to the Holocaust, one misguided sentence can divide families and end friendships. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the same is true in many countries of the Muslim world. In societies and countries that are farther away from this conflict, the debates may proceed differently. But there, too, they are increasingly toxic—from Southeast Asia to Latin America, from the U.S. to Europe.

What are the consequences of this extreme polarization? What are the consequences for a possible cease-fire, armistice or—as anachronistic as it might sound—for a political solution of the Middle East conflict? What about the broader consequences for a world order which, following the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in the U.S., the financial crisis in 2008, the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is clearly decaying?

Noah Millman argues that a lot of commentary about the West’s response to events in the Middle East is premature, because Western reactions depend in part on how the war in Gaza plays out. Israel’s ability to destroy Hamas, and what doing so would require, is just the first of the uncertainties he notes:

Will Israel move in with large forces, or mostly conduct periodic raids from safer positions inside Israel? Will the campaign last weeks? Months? Years? How sustained will the bombardment continue to be, and for how long? Then: how will the United Nations and various NGOs be brought in to relieve the suffering of the Gazan people? Or will they be firmly kept out—or will they refuse to come because the situation isn’t safe enough for them to operate? Will more and more vulnerable Gazans be evacuated … or will Egypt and Israel’s other neighbors and the Gazans themselves refuse to facilitate what they see as a plot to depopulate the Strip and give Israel a freer hand?

Finally, how, more generally, will the other players in the region, hostile and non-hostile, react over time to Israel’s campaign? Will Hezbollah join the war? Will Iran? Will the American military wind up getting drawn in? What about Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia—will they make dramatic efforts to mediate and moderate the conflict … Or will they make no such overtures, and just try to insulate themselves as much as possible from the conflict? Or will they even be drawn in on Israel’s side?

Any of these scenarios—a longer war, a wider war, a war with an unclear outcome—opens up wildly different possibilities for how politics will be shaped in Europe and America in response.

Shadi Hamid cautions against treating terrorism as an irrational phenomenon and support for it as unchangeable:

Terrorism doesn’t fall from the sky. Terror is a tactic. It is a choice. Hamas’s grisly assault on Israel must be analyzed with this in mind. If we ignore this, we make it more likely that other violent organizations will take Hamas’s place even if the group is neutralized or somehow eliminated … According to one July poll, 60 to 75 percent of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank had positive views of Islamic Jihad and the Lions’ Den—groups just as or even more radical than Hamas … There are two ways to look at this. One is to say that something is inherently wrong with Palestinians—a view often expressed by both the Israeli and American right—or even that Palestinians, by supporting groups that are evil, are complicit in that evil. This perspective has dangerous implications: It means downplaying distinctions between combatants and civilians (as many Israeli officials have repeatedly done) and seeing all Palestinians as enemies to be destroyed.

The other way to interpret the survey results is to acknowledge a truth about all people: They’re complicated. In the July poll, half of Gazans agreed that “Hamas should stop calling for Israel’s destruction and instead accept a permanent two-state solution based on the 1967 borders.” But it is possible for Palestinians to support a two-state solution that would allow Israel to exist as a Jewish state while also supporting armed attacks against and inside Israel. It’s more useful to ask how Palestinian attitudes toward violence have evolved. As the journalist Peter Beinart recently noted, at the height of the Oslo accords in 1996—when a settlement seemed possible—Palestinian support for the peace process reached 80 percent while support for violence dropped to around 20 percent. Clearly, Palestinians, like any group, are capable of supporting both violence and nonviolence, depending on the circumstances.

Physical Therapy for New Mothers

Christine Henneberg lays out the case for making PT a more frequent part of post-delivery medical care:

Pregnant women and new mothers are, in a sense, different from other hospitalized patients. Doctors tend to think of them as healthy young people undergoing a normal, natural process, one that should require serious medical intervention only occasionally. This is how my patients tend to see themselves too—and most of them do go on to live normal, if changed, lives. By this philosophy, what new mothers need isn’t intensive rehab, but a brief period (one or two days) of observation, some education about how to feed and care for their baby, and then a timely discharge home, with a single postpartum visit a few weeks later. Indeed, this laissez-faire approach is the standard of care in many U.S. hospitals.

But as the U.S. faces a surging maternal-mortality rate, with more than half of maternal deaths occurring after delivery, physicians are now in wide agreement that the standard of care needs to change. Pregnant women in the U.S. are not as young as they once were. Pregnancy and childbirth can present grave dangers—particularly when a woman already has underlying health conditions. A vaginal delivery is an intense physiological event that involves the rapid expansion and then contraction of the musculoskeletal system, along with dramatic shifts in hormones, blood volume, and heart rate. A Cesarean section is a major surgery that involves cutting through layers of skin, fascia, and muscle—and that’s if everything goes perfectly.

Rebeca Segraves, a Washington State–based doctor of physical therapy specializing in women’s health, told me she was struck early in her career by the realization that women undergoing a C-section did not receive routine postoperative PT. She was used to performing inpatient evaluations for patients recovering from relatively minor illnesses and surgeries, such as pneumonia, gallbladder removal, and prostatectomy. But after a C-section, she says, a PT evaluation “just wasn’t the culture.”

Yes, There Are Principled Supporters of Free Speech

At New York, Jonathan Chait argues that there is a reason for the "the frequency of the claim that free-speech defenders are not consistent in their values":

Insisting that nobody really upholds a value is a way of giving yourself permission to ignore it. Brutal dictators like to say that every government violates human rights; gangsters are fond of insisting they’re no more crooked than any other powerful person.

There is a crucial difference between a specific, factually grounded charge of hypocrisy and a sweeping generalized charge of hypocrisy. The former is designed to uphold standards by shaming those who violate them. The latter is designed to undermine a standard by asserting implicitly that nobody actually cares about it.

The ubiquitous rhetorical move of insisting the “cancel-culture brigades” never criticize right-wing censorship serves that purpose. Its adherents repeat it so frequently because it plays a crucial role in their worldview in discrediting a belief system, free-speech liberalism, that poses a threat by dint of its ideological proximity. (The near enemy is always more dangerous than the far enemy.)

Provocation of the Week: You Have Two Noses

In The Atlantic, Sarah Zhang delivers a passage that forever changed how I think about my body:

The argument that humans have two noses was first put to me by Ronald Eccles, a nose expert who ran the Common Cold Centre at Cardiff University, in Wales, until his retirement a few years ago. This sounds absurd, I know, but consider what your nose—or noses—looks like on the inside: Each nostril opens into its own nasal cavity, which does not connect with the other directly. They are two separate organs, as separate as your two eyes or your two ears.

And far from being a passive tube, the nose’s hidden inner anatomy is constantly changing. It’s lined with venous erectile tissue that has a “similar structure to the erectile tissue in the penis,” Eccles said, and can become engorged with blood. Infection or allergies amplify the swelling, so much so that the nasal passages become completely blocked. This swelling, not mucus, is the primary cause of a stuffy nose, which is why expelling snot never quite fixes congestion entirely …

In healthy noses, the swelling and unswelling of nasal tissue usually follows a predictable pattern called the nasal cycle. Every few hours, one side of the nose becomes partially congested while the other opens. Then they switch, going back and forth, back and forth … The idea made sense as soon as I consciously thought about it: When I’m sick, and extra swelling has turned partial congestion into complete congestion, I do tend to feel more blocked on one side than the other. Once you’re aware of the nasal cycle, you can control it—to some extent.

If you’re suffering from a cold, get the relevant details here. See you next week!

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This is the time to address Israelis in the spirit of mutual respect, hope, and truthfulness; to move beyond the dismissive, derogatory, and threatening words and deeds that define the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis, and between Arabs and Jews.

I was born and raised in Jerusalem. I started out as a Palestinian, then became a Palestinian Jordanian, then an immigrant to America, and then an American, now for more than half a century. But nothing—not time, not distance—has diluted my empathy with the Palestinians and Palestine, and nothing has altered my view that all people have rights and deserve to be treated with respect. During my medical residency in the U.S., I met American Jewish doctors who shared my interests and curiosity, if not necessarily my views. Some of them remain my good friends to this day. I have been fortunate in my work, at the American Task Force on Palestine, to develop treasured and enduring friendships with many Jewish people of different nationalities, including Israelis. It is in this very American spirit that I address Israelis today.

[Graeme Wood: What is Israel trying to accomplish?]

I must start by noting that our family lost everything in Jerusalem in 1948. We survived and even thrived, but this loss is a core truth of my family’s history. Yet even as I have lived Palestinian pain, I have made an effort to study and understand Jewish pain, which is primordial and deep.

Palestinians—almost unanimously—view Zionism not as a triumph, as so many Jews view it, but as a historical tragedy. What is today the nation of Israel began in the late 19th century as a quasi-messianic Western movement to transform historic Palestine into a Jewish state, which had not existed for 2,000 years. The story from our perspective is one of relentless, systematic dispossession of the indigenous Arab population, sponsored by Western colonial powers who were at best cavalier toward Arab rights and aspirations, and at worst brutal and racist.

Viewed this way, one sees that the Zionist project would have faced fierce resistance regardless of whether it comprised Jews, Danes, Samoans, or any other group or sect. And what continues to the present day in Israel/Palestine—an occupation and settlement enterprise that deprives all Palestinians of any form of political or civic rights—would engender hostility in any similar context. The psychology of the prisoner toward his jailer or the subordinate to his master is a far more apposite basis for Palestinian attitudes toward Israel than the paradigm of European-style anti-Semitism, which for centuries otherized Jews as disloyal and untrustworthy, unworthy of equal status with Christian citizens. Despite a common misperception, we Palestinians understand the terrible crimes that were committed against Jews by European Christianity, and we know that, while not nearly so dire, the experience of Jews living as minorities in Muslim-majority countries had its acute challenges and dangers. But this doesn’t change the essential fact that the Palestinians are bystanders to history, and victims of it.

Ultimately, though—no matter what happens in Gaza—two peoples will still have to share the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The Israelis aren’t leaving, and neither are the Palestinians. Israel exists, no matter what Hamas might want. Its regional military supremacy and support from Western superpowers ensure that it is here to stay. The Israelis have a strong national identity and sense of purpose, and that is only reinforced, as we have seen, by brutal attacks against their civilians.

Palestinians are never going to become Zionists or fall in love with Israeli nationalism. That, however, should not be the standard or the goal. Israel and the world should strive to strengthen the very large community of Palestinians who accept Israel but who seek full political rights and equal standing as citizens. If the world values the ethos of human dignity regardless of race or religion, then at some point Palestinians, including Palestinian refugees, will need to have a nation-state of their own, whether in a unified polity consisting of the West Bank and Gaza, or in a single Israel/Palestine state, or in an agreed-upon regional federation where all residents are citizens with full equal rights. Israelis will need an iron-clad guarantee of their security and a comprehensive, binding cessation of all hostilities, as well as a normalization of relations with their Middle Eastern neighbors.

[Read: A war to end all wars between Israel and Palestine]

No one, especially not now, can be deluded into thinking that any of this will be easy. I’ve spent much of my life pursuing the goal of Palestinian independence, to no avail. A reckoning and reconciliation of this magnitude will face implacable foes, including fundamentalist Islamists who reject Israel outright and traffic in the worst sort of anti-Semitism; militant secular Zionists who treat Arabs as strangers in their own land; right-wing religious Zionists who thirst for a “Greater Land of Israel” and eschew Palestinian rights altogether; and Christian evangelicals who view an expansionist Israel as crucial to their end-times theology. Belligerence is mutually reinforcing, and everyone involved must reject this cycle of hostility.

Moreover, both sides will have a lot to put behind them. For Palestinians, the scars of the Nakba of 1948, the humiliating military defeats since then, the occupation, and the pervasive domination of their lives. For Israelis, the refusal of Palestinians to accept their ancient connection to the land, and decades of cruel, fanatical terror campaigns.

But all of this hard work can be done, and obstacles can be overcome if we prioritize our children’s futures over the grievances of our grandparents.

There is nothing mystical about conflicts among human beings. There never has been, nor will there be, a military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian situation. Israel obviously can, in its campaign against Hamas, flatten Gaza. It has the machines and bombs to do so. But it can’t destroy the Palestinian desire to be free. Rather, political strife throughout history has been most durably resolved through dialogue, give-and-take, and mature acceptance of outcomes that do not satisfy all ambitions. Weapons may kill or defend against killing, but human bonds and relations are what will create and then keep the peace. Some might say that now, while we stand at the edge of an abyss, is the worst time to ask for maturity and compromise and a recognition of each other’s humanity. But this is a message that needs to be heard, especially now.

Earlier this week, while walking through central Jerusalem, I heard a chant in the distance. War has driven away tourists, and in a tourist city without tourists, sounds carry far. The discernible portion of the chant was a single word in Hebrew, akshav—“now.” I followed the sound to Safra Square, where a crowd had gathered, yelling in sorrow and fury, to protest the kidnapping of more than 240 people, most of them Israelis, by Hamas.

Survivors from Kibbutz Nir Oz (which lost a quarter of its population in the October 7 pogrom) had taken over Safra Square and installed an exhibit consisting of beds, neatly made, for each of the hostages currently in Gaza. They were arranged in a grid. Some were queen beds. Others were singles. Some had books on nightstands nearby. Several were IKEA cribs, for the dozens of children among the captives. One didn’t need to know even that one word of Hebrew to figure out what the crowd was demanding—the return of the hostages, without delay—and what it was promising: the creation of a civic movement that will continue screaming at the Israeli government, in anger and recrimination, until the hostages are back.

[Graeme Wood: What is Israel trying to accomplish?]

I spoke with relatives of six of the Nir Oz hostages whose kidnappings were captured on video that spread within hours of the attack. The abductees are Shiri Silberman-Bibas, 32, who was kidnapped with her husband, Yarden, and two young children; Tamir Adar, 38, a young father last seen sealing his family into their safe room; and Yaffa Adar, 85. If you saw images of the kidnappings on the day of the attack, these were probably the people you saw. Silberman-Bibas is the distraught mom with two redheaded kids clutched to her chest. Yaffa Adar is the white-haired woman being taken to Gaza by golf cart.

Yifat Zaila is an architect in Herzliya and Shiri’s cousin. She told me that she talked with her uncle, Shiri’s father, at 7:30 on the morning of the attack. He lived in the kibbutz and said that they were in their safe room and that she shouldn’t worry. Her WhatsApp shows that he logged in for the last time that morning at 9:05. Zaila quickly determined that six members of her family were missing: Shiri’s family as well as her aunt and uncle, Margit and Yossi Silberman. The Silbermans’ house had been burned down, but their bodies were not in the ashes, so she held out hope that they were alive in Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces told her they found her aunt’s keychain near the border. But last Friday, they informed her that their corpses had been recovered. The IDF told her that for security reasons, they would not say whether the bodies were in Gaza, at the border, or somewhere else.

“I don’t speak about it to the Israeli media,” Zaila told me. “I know it’s absurd. But if for some reason Shiri is watching television, I don’t want her to find out like this about her parents.”

She thinks about what it might be like for her nephew Kfir, who was nine months old when captured and is 10 months old now, to live in a dungeon. “How can a baby so young survive in these conditions?” she asked. “You’re supposed to learn how to clap, or see when a light goes on.” His brother, Ariel, 4, is energetic, “nonstop,” she said. “How can he sit in a room somewhere? I don’t know if they can even see the light of day.”

Zaila’s mother and grandparents came to Israel from Argentina in the 1970s, to escape the junta that assassinated leftists, in some cases by throwing them out of airplanes into the sea. The relatives of these “disappeared” have been tortured with uncertainty about what happened ever since. “My grandfather was very involved in politics, and he was scared to get the knock on the door,” she told me. “That’s why he came here.” Now the uncertainty has sought her out.

So have numerous Hamas enthusiasts, who have bombarded Zaila’s cellphone with taunting images. (She became internationally famous after going on CNN and making Anderson Cooper cry on the air.) “I receive a lot of hate messages telling me, ‘Hamas is taking care of your babies,’” she said. “It puzzles me. Our family, we’re left-wing.” They were peaceniks. “We never want to see anyone hurt. And now we find that they just wanted us dead. Not peace. Just dead.” She said she still has hope for the West Bank, which is run by the Palestinian Authority, a rival of Hamas. But Hamas, she said, made its views abundantly clear. “I was sure they were people just like me. They just want peace. It shook my entire existence.”

Soldiers walk through the debris of a destroyed home in the attack by Hamas militants on Kibbutz Be’eri. Be’eri is 16 miles from Kibbutz Nir Oz. (Photograph by Jerome Sessini/Magnum for The Atlantic)

Adva Adar understands that the world will always think of her grandmother as the golf-cart woman. The footage was admittedly surreal: a granny surrounded by killers and being driven out of her kibbutz in her geriatric chariot, as if on the way to a communal meal or a session at a painting studio. Adva also realizes that the world was transfixed by her grandmother’s expression: an enigmatic smile, held for the whole video while she was carted off to an uncertain fate.

[Yair Rosenberg: ‘We’re going to die here’]

Yaffa Adar is a classic labor-lefty kibbutznik who has lived in Nir Oz for 60 years. She has three children, eight grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren, of whom Adva’s daughter is the youngest. When we spoke, the baby’s first birthday was five days away. “Ever since my child was born, it’s like she and my grandmother were connected,” Adva told me. “All day [my grandmother] would look at pictures of her. [My child] meant the world to [my grandmother]. And thinking of us celebrating her first year without my grandmother—that breaks my heart.

“The last message we got from her was around 9 a.m.,” Adva said. “We were texting in the family group since 6 o’clock. And around 9 a.m. she wrote that we wouldn’t believe it, but they had started to enter the houses.”

Elsewhere in the kibbutz, Yaffa’s ex-husband, Adva’s grandfather, was trapped in his house while Hamas set it on fire. “Thank God, he survived,” Adva told me. His wife was able to rescue him. “But, you know, his soul is dead. It was not his lungs. His soul is dead, and it is like he aged a hundred years from what they did to him.”

Adva’s cousin Tamir, 38, also lived on the kibbutz. He left his wife and two kids, 7 and 3, locked in their home and went out to engage the terrorists. “I won’t be back,” Adva says he told them. He was afraid the terrorists would force him to lure his family out. “No matter what, even if you hear me ask, don’t open the door.” His wife and children survived. Tamir is among the kidnapped.

About Yaffa’s fate, nothing is publicly known, except that the IDF confirmed to the family that she is one of the hostages. All of the footage from Hamas cameras and surveillance footage has been scoured for clues. “The elders that survived, each one was really attached to his golf cart,” Adva said, with a tiny laugh. “When the video came out, they tried to find whose golf cart it was.” Yifat Zaila told me that many of the golf carts had been stolen—someone had tried to link them up and bring them all, loaded with loot, into Gaza, but had abandoned the project halfway to the border.

It was left to those who know Yaffa to interpret her smile in the video. “People think she has dementia or Alzheimer’s, because it seems like she’s not getting the situation,” Adva told me. “But her mind is clear. She’s sharp.”

“She’s one of the people that established this country, who believe in living here, and who have pride. They can kidnap her, but they can’t kidnap her pride. And she would not let them see her suffering or hurt or scared.” This is what Adva sees in her grandmother’s face. “She will sit there and she will look them in the eyes and she will let them see that she’s a human being and not scared of them.”

Blackened fruit on a kitchen table. (Photograph by Jerome Sessini/Magnum for The Atlantic) A home interior destroyed by Hamas militants, Kibbutz Be’eri. (Photograph by Jerome Sessini/Magnum for The Atlantic)

The hostages’ families have spoken out individually and collectively about the plight of their loved ones—in general, to call for their return through some form of negotiation. On Friday, a contingent of them protested at the Kirya, Israel’s military headquarters, to demand that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declare that no cease-fire will take place until the hostages are all home. Some have vowed, starting Friday night, to camp out in front of the Kirya until all of the hostages are home. The families have a gold-star status, which none of them sought, but which gives their voices unusual heft in Israel. The model for their effort is the campaign that lasted more than a thousand days to keep in the public mind the name of Gilad Shalit, a single Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in 2006 and released in 2011. Zaila, who served in Gaza with the IDF, said the government would have forgotten about Shalit if ordinary people hadn’t kept his name on the agenda. Time was the enemy, and as the years passed, it seemed less possible that the episode would ever conclude.

“In the first week, I thought I had an 80 percent chance of seeing them.” The next week she figured it was 70. Calculating those odds may not be psychologically healthy, Zaila conceded. “Being stupid sometimes helps,” she told me wistfully, “because you don’t know the result of things.”

“If I think about the politics, I get angry,” she added. “I think about how [my family] was left alone for hours. And now that there is a ground invasion, of course I think about my family over there, that they are going to be collateral damage. They can’t rescue 230 hostages.” With that in mind, she continued; “If we haven’t [been] able to take down Hamas for how many years now, I don’t think we will succeed now. I don’t think my family will be saved like this.” She hopes instead for “a deal,” but fears that Hamas and Israel will strike some compromise that leaves her family members still in Gaza. “There will probably be a cease-fire. And then they will just be names,” impossibly low on a long list of priorities. “That is what they did with Gilad.”

[Read: The end of Netanyahu]

A fence in the buffer zone between Kibbutz Be’eri and Gaza. (Photograph by Jerome Sessini/Magnum for The Atlantic)

But like so many of the hostages’ families, she feels most bitter toward, and least confident in, the politicians who would have to make that deal. The Netanyahu government left her family unprotected, she said. “This right-wing government shifted its entire focus to the West Bank to support the extreme right wing, so they could build a sukkah”—a shelter for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot—“in [the] center of Hawara,” a flash-point city in the West Bank. She thinks security resources were diverted from Gaza, and that the massacre followed. “My family were abandoned. And now they’re keeping them in Gaza.”

The IDF is helpful, she said, but the government ministers aren’t attending the funerals when new bodies turn up. They are mortified and cowardly.

“Maybe they don’t want to be screamed at,” I offered.

“Okay,” she said with a shrug. “A great leader needs to go stand still and receive criticism in times of grief. This is how you measure someone—whether he knows how to lower his head and say, I made a mistake. I’m sorry.”

A new pattern is emerging in Chinese foreign policy that bodes poorly for global stability: Chinese leader Xi Jinping pretends to favor peaceful resolutions to international conflicts while actually encouraging the world’s most destabilizing forces.

In the Middle East, Beijing has vociferously called for an end to the fighting between Israel and Hamas and claims to take an evenhanded approach to the belligerents. But the Chinese government is, in effect, backing Hamas—and therefore terrorism. Xi’s position on Gaza is identical to his stance on the world’s other major conflict, the war in Ukraine. There, too, Beijing has asserted principled neutrality and even launched a peace mission, while at the same time deepening ties to Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin.

[Read: China plays peacemaker]

Beijing seeks to exploit both of these crises in order to undermine the United States and promote its own global leadership. To this end, Xi backs the aggressor, blames the United States for the resulting disorder, and then portrays himself as the more responsible peacemaker with better solutions to the world’s problems. China and Russia are in this game together: Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi had the chutzpah to call for a cease-fire in Gaza in discussions with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, while the Russian army was grinding up civilians in Ukraine.

Officially, China’s leaders have tried to appear impartial on the Gaza conflict. They have repeatedly made generic statements—for instance, that they “oppose and condemn all violence and attacks against civilians.” But Beijing has pointedly avoided condemning Hamas for the atrocities it committed against Israeli citizens on October 7, which touched off the current crisis. Denouncing that attack would be “illogical,” according to the Global Times, a news outlet run by the Chinese Communist Party, because the broader conflict was “partly caused by Western colonization and exacerbated by US biased Middle East policies.” Beijing won’t even mention Hamas in its official comments, asserting instead that the conflict is between Israel and Palestine.

China’s position has hardened against Israel as the fighting has intensified. On October 14, just a week after Hamas’s attack, Wang Yi stated that Israel’s response had already “gone beyond self-defense.” China’s ambassador to the United Nations justified vetoing a Security Council resolution, sponsored by the United States and calling for pauses in the fighting for humanitarian efforts, on the grounds that the draft was “seriously out of balance” because it didn’t address the issue of Palestinian statehood, among other reasons. The Chinese ambassador then called for Israel to lift its Gaza siege—without mentioning Hamas or demanding that the group release Israeli hostages.

Beijing seems to have little compunction about calling out Western hypocrisy while indulging in doublespeak of its own. Commentary in the state-owned China Daily blasted the “double standard exhibited by many Western leaders” who, for example, deplore Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine but supposedly fail to hold Israel similarly accountable for the suffering caused by its siege of Gaza. And yet China, the erstwhile defender of the rights of Palestinians, is engaged in widespread human-rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, where Chinese leaders claim to be prosecuting an anti-terror campaign, and Beijing has flatly denied the national aspirations of people, such as the Tibetans, who live in territories that the Communist Party considers integral to China.

The United States is, as usual, China’s real target: Beijing wants to pin responsibility for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Washington, to point to as evidence that the United States has lost its purchase as a world leader. The Global Times opined that the major driver behind the conflict was “the marginalization of the Palestinian issue by the United States and European powers,” a deficit that shows that “the United States and Europe have significantly weakened their capacity to uphold the existing world order.”

China’s leaders evidently hope that showing sympathy for Palestinians will endear them to the Arab world and bolster their effort to build support in the global South. But the complexities of the Middle East, which have bedeviled Washington for decades, are likely to also plague Chinese diplomats, who are relative newcomers to the region. Although support for the Palestinian cause is widespread, many Arab leaders also consider Hamas to be a terror organization. For example, the United Arab Emirates has criticized Hamas for the October 7 attack far more sharply than China has. Jonathan Fulton, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who specializes in China’s relations with the Middle East, told me that China’s effort to capitalize on the current crisis to sell itself in the region as the champion of all who have been oppressed by the United States has run up against the problem that “not every Arab country sees this the same way.” As a result, he said, “China’s response here has been a little ineffectual.”

China’s will and capacity to serve as a global peacemaker has been even more underwhelming. Beijing has previously offered to mediate between Israel and the Palestinians, and it dispatched an envoy to the region after the current crisis erupted. Wang Yi told Israel’s foreign minister that Beijing “will exert its utmost to do anything conducive to the reconciliation” between the Palestinians and Israelis. But Chinese diplomats probably don’t have the pull to lure the two sides to the negotiating table. Even before the current crisis, the Israelis, close American allies, greeted Chinese overtures with skepticism. Now Beijing has struck an overtly pro-Palestinian position that one Israeli envoy has called “disturbing,” and which only deepens Israeli distrust in China’s ability to serve as an impartial mediator.

Xi does have relationships in the Middle East, however, and he could be doing more—if he wanted to. China was able to capitalize on its economic clout to broker a detente between Saudi Arabia and Iran earlier this year. Iran, much like Russia, relies on China for economic and political support due to its isolation from the West. Xi has raised Iran’s diplomatic profile, most recently by spearheading an expansion of the BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—group of emerging nations, which invited Tehran to join in August. China also purchases nearly all of Iran’s oil exports, according to estimates from the data provider Kpler—a fact that Beijing tries to obfuscate because the Islamic Republic is under international sanctions.

[Read: The axis of resistance has been gathering strength]

Tehran is a significant player in the current conflict, as the major benefactor behind Hamas, Hezbollah, and several other regional militias that have threatened to widen the war. But Xi does not appear to have leveraged his influence to prod Iran into easing the crisis or at least preventing its escalation. Beijing could also work with Egypt, another close political and economic partner, to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, about which China claims to be so concerned. But it does not appear to have done so. In a recent note, Trivium, a China-focused research firm, opined that Beijing’s “hands-off” approach to international affairs “is appealing during peacetime, but can’t yet deliver security when it counts.”

China wants credit for stating the obvious—that peace is better than war—without the responsibility or entanglements involved in bringing that peace about. Worse, Xi appears willing to risk global instability in the pursuit of his geopolitical ambitions. The game he’s playing is a dangerous one—even for China itself, because the country depends heavily on energy imported from the Middle East. An escalation of the Gaza conflict into a wider regional war could be a disaster for China from an economic standpoint alone.

The same argument could be made of the broader dynamics Xi seeks to upset. More turmoil in the U.S.-led global order, which has historically underpinned China’s development into a great power, would undercut the country’s economic progress. But Xi’s policies toward Gaza and Ukraine show his readiness to torch the current order in pursuit of a China-centric world, whatever the long-term consequences are likely to be.

The civilian casualties have spiraled with a UN school-turned-shelter and hospitals targeted.

The top US diplomat's stance is at odds with that of Arab states who are calling for an immediate ceasefire.