Israel has for too long shied away from developing foreign policy on matters that do not directly concern it • The profound changes in US-China relations will force it, perhaps, to reconsider.Last week, there was an uncharacteristic agreement between the Trump administration and Joe Biden's election headquarters. It concerns China's attitude toward the Uighurs (or "Wigurs"), the Turkish-speaking Muslim minority, who live in the Xinjiang region of northwest China.
There are about 12 million Uighurs in China, with a total population of 1.4 billion. Beijing considers the Uyghurs' interest in their heritage, religious and ethnic, as a threat to its territorial integrity. According to reports in a row of Western media, perhaps a million Uighurs have been thrown into concentration camps. The goal: to rearrange their brain cells, and to rid them of their "extremism," that is, their identity.
Both the Trump administration and the Biden headquarters think of China's treatment of Uyghurs for genocide, that is, genocide. China hates criticism. Any criticism. One day it hopes to swap places with the US. One day Chinese sanctions will be more painful than American sanctions. Meanwhile, America is imposing the painful sanctions, and China has been forced to bite its lips.
What will Israel do if the US administration, one or the other after it, does classify the treatment of Uighurs as genocide? What will the state that was established to provide refuge for genocide survivors do?
It is better to prepare for this day. The instinct will be to shrug. Israel has not been impressed for many years by the annihilation of the Armenian people, as long as it had a real interest in Turkey's goodwill. Israel was not impressed by the parallels between Nazi Germany and South Africa's apartheid, with which it had close military relations. The idea that Israel would jeopardize its important relations with China in favor of the human rights of some Turks in the Central Asian steppe would be ridiculed by decision-makers.
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