The Palestinian Authority president’s imminent state visit to China is believed even by senior Palestinian officials to be aimed at bolstering Beijing’s credentials on the world stage, rather than a serious attempt to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Mahmoud Abbas’s four-day visit, which is scheduled to begin on Tuesday, has been described by Chinese state media as aimed at facilitating new talks predicated on a two-state solution to the decades-old conflict. It also comes on the heels of Beijing’s recent success in brokering a detente between the Middle East’s two major religious and geopolitical poles, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
