Mick Hartley

This is all very disturbing. Apparently Israel – perhaps filling the void left by America's increasing lack of interest – is developing serious ties with China. Matti Friedman in Tablet:

Last week I drove up to Haifa to see with my own eyes a sight that, for most Israelis, has yet to sink in: the country’s brand new port, our third, which is beautiful, automated, efficient, and operated by the same Chinese company that runs the megaport at Shanghai. The first full container ship dropped anchor the day after my visit. Chinese characters adorn the soaring ship-to-shore cranes, freshly painted red and white; Israeli workers man joysticks opposite computer arrays running Chinese software; and in the managerial offices sit Chinese executives. To get to the port, I paid a toll and drove through the Carmel Tunnels, which were dug a few years ago by the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation. At a gas station on the way I bought a pineapple yogurt made by the iconic dairy-products giant Tnuva, founded as a cooperative by Labor Zionists and now controlled by Bright Food—263 Huashan Road, Jing’an District, Shanghai. China was far, far away, until suddenly it was right here.

The most prominent face of China in Israel belongs to a guy named "Chinese Itzik", whose real name is Xi Xiaoqi. He sings the praises of Israel in perfect Hebrew to an audience that, frankly, doesn't get to hear much from foreigners about what a great country they live in, and finds it all, unsurprisingly, very appealing. But he's a smart operator:

Itzik is worth watching not just because he’s entertaining and interesting, but because he’s a way to understand how China would like to talk to Israelis now. Someone there is watching us carefully and learning fast. It was only in 2014 that the local Chinese embassy hosted Liu Qibao, a member of the Politburo, for a speech at Tel Aviv University, and asked university administrators to instruct students to stand outside the building waving Chinese flags.

When I asked Itzik about human-rights abuses in places like Xinjiang, for example, which have been widely reported in the Western press, he replied, “I think the Israelis can understand China better than anyone else.” He meant that Israel is also the target of misleading coverage from the same outlets reporting on China, and that Jews are used to being lied about. “There’s the blood libel,” he said, “the idea that Israelis are drinking the blood of Palestinians. Speaking honestly, before I came to Israel, I heard things like that as well. But I wondered if it was true. And I came and checked and saw that it wasn’t.” He noted the abuse of the term “genocide,” which of course has been thrown around by Israel’s opponents as well as China’s, and has lost much of its meaning.

So Israel and China share the common but inaccurate accusation of committing genocide? Clever. Nonsense, but clever. Xinjiang and Gaza have nothing in common.

Beyond the realms of concrete and steel, a notable feature of China’s presence here can be found in the two Confucius Institutes that opened at Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University. The centers for China studies have brought Israeli scholars and students into greater contact with Chinese people—and with their government, which funds the institutes and shapes their content. Some scholars in Israel, like many colleagues abroad concerned by the approximately 500 Confucius Institutes that have opened worldwide, have warned that the centers compromise the academy. Once you’re in bed with “Confucius,” enjoying Chinese funding and scholarships, you’ll think twice before antagonizing the people who write the check.

One critic is Noam Urbach, who fell in love with China after a post-army trip in the 1990s, followed by a few years of travel and study at Shandong University. He later spent more than a decade teaching Mandarin at Bar-Ilan University and the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. He found himself feeling increasingly unwelcome in the field as his criticism of Chinese government policies was frowned upon by colleagues and administrators eager to cooperate with Chinese institutions, less in the cash-strapped humanities than in science and tech, where real money is at stake. Israeli academics who study China, he said, have learned to speak very differently in public and in private. I asked if this meant that a department head, for example, might quietly suggest that a doctoral student change a research topic, or decide that a proposed academic conference might best be indefinitely postponed. “All the time,” he said.

“Let’s say an academic department in the sciences is studying a certain plant, and starts accepting funding from that plant to say good things about it,” he said. “Once that happens, those botanists aren’t botanists anymore.” Urbach isn’t describing an obscure academic spat: He’s saying that Israel’s China-watchers are being neutralized by the people they’re supposed to be watching. Urbach has let his doctoral studies lapse and currently runs an art gallery.

A moment of understanding came, he said, when he served as a translator at a meeting for executives from an Israeli company and the Chinese firm that had just bought a controlling share. (He wouldn’t name the companies.) The Chinese executives, he said, had studied every nook of the Israeli operation and knew every detail of every government regulation in the market. The investment, he understood, combined political and economic goals that were meant to serve each other.

Let’s take the dairy giant Tnuva. Any internal Israeli decision—about, say, fat content in processed cheese—now impacts a state-linked Chinese company. That decision is thus tied to our relationship with China, which includes tunnels and hydroelectric plants and ports, and might result in the phone ringing in the office of Israel’s foreign minister. Nihao!

We have “entered the stage in which the Chinese have begun to create economic centers of power, which in time can be transformed into strategic and geopolitical centers of power,” Shai, the China scholar, who is a proponent of ties with the Chinese, wrote in his 2019 book China and Israel. “Realistically, we must anticipate that in Israel as well as in the region that it occupies, China will have influence at a level that currently seems the stuff of fantasy.”

There's plenty more, but here's Friedman's conclusion:

China does billions of dollars of business with Iran. A major Chinese firm now has an entire port in Haifa. Imagine the port is disrupted or damaged, costing millions. A phone rings in Tehran. Nihao!

What happens then? What does all this mean for the Middle East? And what happens if the U.S.-China cold war becomes hot, with Israel in an increasingly convoluted minefield of interests—a Sixth Fleet port-of-call on one side of the bay, Shanghai on the other? It’s impossible to say. All we know is that a ship has sailed, and we’re on board.