What kind of knavery is this?
You would only make such dopey statements as the ones below if you were stupid or if you were lying. That is, if you are either a knave or a fool.
You couldn't say what Beijing Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning says, with a straight face, if you knew what's going on in the Middle East. Which is that the "two state solution" has been dead since 2000. Since Israel offered it to the PLO Leader Yasser Arafat, who accepted it provisionally, then rejected it because he said he'd be killed by his "radical colleagues" if he accepted. And then commenced intifada terrorism.
In other words, even the PLO, allegedly more moderate than HAMAS, and claimed to be the interlocutor of peace, the "partner" in negotiations for Israel, won't accept a two state solution, but only One Palestine, Free, from the River to the Sea.
What the Palestinians of all stripes want and have made clear they want is One Palestine. Free of Jews.
A Judenrein Levant. Shades of… well, the Fourth Reich.
I don't believe senior Chinese foreign ministry people are Fools. Ergo: they are Knaves. That is to say: they are liars. (pace the oft-quoted rubric that diplomacy means: "being sent abroad to lie for your country”).
But what kind of knavery is this? What does China gain by the lying?
The answer, I guess, is Beijing gets to look like the good guys and to fool lots of credulous people around the world including the readers of the South China Morning Post.
The knaves get to be the good guys. The new "honest brokers”.
Of whom no uncomfortable questions about China's occupation of Tibet, of Mongolia and of "East Turkistan" (aka Xinjiang) shall be asked!
Snip:
"As a friend to both Israel and Palestine, what we hope to see is the two countries living together in peace … The key to achieving that lies in the realisation of the two-state solution and establishment of an independent state of Palestine," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said amid the latest round of clashes between Israel and Hamas.Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that "China believes that the historical injustices against Palestine have lasted for more than half a century and cannot go on". Accordingly, he emphasised that "China is ready to work with Saudi Arabia and other Arab states to continue supporting the Palestinians' just cause of restoring their national rights".
“... restoring their national rights”?? The Palestinians -- a name appropriated by Yasser Arafat only after 1967 -- have never had a “nation”! Get it right Wang.