Earlier this year, StandWithUs (SWU), a pro-Israeli American advocacy group that coordinates its activities closely with the Israeli government, finally unveiled an SWU-China division for its organization in an event that marked a joint celebration of the Chinese New Year and Jewish Tu B’Shvat in Jerusalem (involving, interestingly enough, talks by three Israel Defense Force soldiers from China’s Kaifeng Jewish community).
The creation of SWU-China follows years of tentative public diplomacy and engagement that started around 2009, and in which China has increasingly been identified by the SWU leadership “as a country in which we can make a difference,” according to SWU’s Director Michael Dickson. He saw the SWU playing a major role in combating “misinformation in the Chinese media about Israel” and “Islamic anti-Israel propaganda on university campuses.” This would be accomplished, according to Ayala Sherman-Oren, the SWU-Asia director, by “utilizing social media, university programs, and networking events” that would serve “to connect and cultivate relationships between Israel’s and Asia’s business professionals and social leaders” – effectively, “the next generation of the Chinese leadership.”
SWU’s outreach into China is but the latest manifestation of a growing decade-long trend in which a network of loosely affiliated pro-Israeli organizations – largely Jewish American in character – and embracing a number of think tanks, universities, lobbyist groups, philanthropist foundations, and activist-scholars, are actively seeking to alter Chinese perceptions of Israel, with a particular focus on effecting this change among influential academic and policymaking institutions and universities there. The assumption underlying this approach is that in the absence of traditional channels for lobbying in China, influencing such centers of knowledge production becomes the only effective means of re-shaping Beijing’s views in ways that may serve Israeli interests over the long run. Many of these groups have traditionally been involved in pro-Israeli advocacy outreach in the United States and bring with them considerable logistical, organizational, and even ideational experience not to mention specific models of advocacy that they seek to reproduce within China.
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