In the West, it’s no secret that the Chinese government is not exactly a friend of liberal democracy. But in Israel, China has not always been viewed as the danger to freedom that many in New York, London and elsewhere perceive it to be.
Well, that’s changing, and I explored why in my Shabbat column in Israel Hayom, an excerpt of which is below. You can read it on Israel Hayom’s website here.
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“China and Israel are nations with thousands of years of history,” Netanyahu boasted a few years ago at China’s National Day ceremony in the ambassador’s residence. In that sense, it seems only a moment has passed since that unprecedented high point in relations.
Two years ago, at the peak of the Biden administration’s boycott of him, Netanyahu announced he would make an official visit to Beijing. Officially, he said this was coordinated with the Americans and would not harm ties with Washington. In practice, it was a clear signal: if you keep undermining us, we have other strategic anchors. When China’s vice president visited Israel, Netanyahu proudly noted that Israel was one of the few countries whose leader attended both the American and Chinese independence celebrations.
Well, not anymore. It wasn’t a slip of the tongue the other week when Netanyahu named China and Qatar as two of the world’s greatest producers of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment. He said it once at the Finance Ministry, and repeated it that evening at the Foreign Ministry: “Israel is under a media siege from the West, funded by vast sums of money from Qatar, and from countries like China.”
Everyone knows about the money Qatar invests. But what about China? The reference is to TikTok and its algorithm. Officially, the app is privately owned, but in China such a thing doesn’t really exist. In Israel, TikTok’s algorithm alone is blamed for damage on par with two foreign armies. It has trapped Western youth into a worldview where Israel is the villain and Hamas the hero. I tried a short experiment last week: I opened a video on Gaza — three minutes later, my whole feed had turned genocidal.
Not everyone at the top liked this new front. “Do we really need another battlefield in this war — to take on China too?” a senior diplomatic official asked last week. He noted that if TikTok is such a problem, it could be raised in the ongoing talks between Israel’s and China’s foreign ministers. After all, on the front marked most important, there have been gains: the Iranians feel completely abandoned by Beijing during and after Operation Rising Lion, with weapons supplies and oil imports far less than the ayatollahs expected.
Perhaps this is a gift to President Trump. In a divided Washington, where each party has its own weather forecast, the only bipartisan consensus is hatred of China. Israel has nearly halted the infrastructure deals with China that were so common here a decade ago, and the Shin Bet has already warned Israelis against trading sensitive security information with Beijing. Perhaps this is Israel’s way of signaling to Trump: you’re with us, and we’re with you.
