The local press primarily mined Netanyahu’s 60 Minutes interview for headlines regarding enriched uranium and Donald Trump. As a result, his response to an unusual question about Chinese involvement in the war in Iran was largely overlooked. It has been a long time since the prime minister appeared so cautious—so intentionally vague. “Look,” he told the interviewer, “different countries have different interests… Does China want its supply chain to be with the Iranians? It’s not a zero-sum game… There are dangers and opportunities in everything… like in AI… there President Trump and President Xi will talk about AI… there too are dangers and opportunities…”
The PM wasn’t squirming for nothing. He too knows that China is too important to clash with head-on. On one of the days of the war, someone in the Israeli top echelon wondered what would happen if the Chinese turned on the camera in the robotic vacuum cleaner in the home of an IDF major general, and what if they decided to pass information to the Iranians about impact zones using the enormous number of [Chinese] vehicles they have in Israel (much more than in the US or Europe).
From Beijing’s perspective, Israel is not a sales target, it is a strategic target—a deliberate and systematic chipping away at American influence in the heart of the Middle East and gaining a foothold in a technological-military power. While the Americans operate on the top floor through the government, politics, and military cooperation, the Chinese infiltrate through the floorboards. Perhaps Israelis should feel flattered that the two superpowers are bickering over our attention, but we need to remain careful.
President Donald Trump arrives in Beijing last night. (White House/X)
China, unlike Qatar, does not support Iran out of love for the Ayatollahs, nor out of hatred for Israel. It does so because it needs chaos in the Middle East that will drain US resources and attention away from Taiwan and the South China Sea. For Xi Jinping, every dollar the US invests in interceptors for Israel is a dollar not invested in submarines in the Strait of Malacca. This quiet war is China’s way of buying time in the clash of titans against the United States. The Iran war is where the Chinese are testing American boundaries and their willingness to go all the way.
The event is only getting more complicated. Take the Strait of Hormuz, for example. The Iranians are trying to create a new equation and control the world through violent control over the straits. This might be good for the Iranians, but for the Chinese, it is terrible. Why? Because while transit through Hormuz is important to the Chinese, transit through the Strait of Malacca is much more important. This is a narrow strait between Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore, practically controlled by the US. Eighty percent of China’s oil imports pass through it. If the method of blocking shipping lanes becomes a legitimate means, it means the US will acquire almost absolute control over the Chinese. And that is just one example.
Another example comes specifically from Israel: the amount of military knowledge and capabilities built and tested here over the past three years is historically unprecedented. Israel is considered today around the world as a formidable power with field-tested experience. The war is the world’s largest testing lab for artificial intelligence on the battlefield. When Israel disrupts UAV swarms or eliminates 20 scientists in Iran in a few seconds, it makes its superiority practical. Trump brings receipts showing that Chinese technology is inferior to the Israeli-American mind, clarifying to them that he holds the tap to the knowledge and the blockade against everything they are trying to achieve. In this battle, Israel is the US’s combat R&D department, and for Trump, this is a tremendous bargaining chip.
Trump knows that the one keeping Iran alive today, even if quietly, is the empire from the East. They are the ones still trading with the Iranians while bypassing sanctions; they are the ones providing them with intelligence and even certain types of weaponry. For the Chinese, for example, air defense batteries are considered offensive weapons, but ballistic missiles are somehow defined as defensive weapons. Go figure.
Just as Israel set a goal for itself to break the Middle Eastern axis of evil, Trump set a goal for himself to break the Chinese-Russian-Iranian-North Korean axis of evil. If he disconnects the Chinese from the axis—he will weaken it significantly and bring it closer to the goal he desires so much: an absolute and indisputable victory, in a short time, and with a relatively low number of casualties.
This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Israel Hayom
