INSS Insight No. 422, May 2, 2013.
Evron, Yoram
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to make an official visit to China in early May 2013. This would be the first visit by an Israeli prime minister to China in over six years, and given the rarity of the meetings between the two heads of state and China’s increased influence internationally, the trip is important. Furthermore, this past March China completed a change of government, and new people are now holding top leadership positions. This will be an opportunity for Israel to meet China’s new leaders, some of whom are expected to remain in their positions for the next ten years.
No less important, China has been rethinking its Middle Eastern policy since the start of the Arab Spring. Since China opened up to the world in the late 1970s, its approach to the Middle East has been characterized by a lack of significant involvement in political and diplomatic processes in the region, exclusive focus on promoting its economic interests, and maintenance of a balanced policy toward states and other actors in the region.
The Arab Spring, which damaged China’s economic interests in the region, coupled with Beijing’s declared intention in recent years to acquire a significant status in world politics, led China to presume that its existing policy toward the Middle East has exhausted itself. Instead, it must deepen its ties in the region in order to establish a firm, long term foothold while exploiting the fact that the regional array of forces is undergoing significant change. The highly influential October 2012 article by Wang Jisi, China’s leading Chinese scholar of international relations, created a stir by asserting that China needs to adopt a new strategy, “march West,” strengthening its influence and position in Central Asia and the Middle East.
This trend entails a significant challenge for Israel. If China assumes that Israel’s close relations with the United States will prevent Israel from strengthening its relationship with China, and at the same time, Beijing assesses that its dependence on Arab (and Iranian) oil will grow, the process of its increasing involvement in the Middle East is liable to bypass Israel. In the meantime, as is demonstrated by China’s invitation to Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, at the same time Netanyahu will be visiting there (albeit for a slightly shorter visit), China is adhering to its balanced approach to Israel and the Palestinians and is linking bilateral relations with Israel to its regional policy. Clearly, the Sino-Israeli bilateral relationship still does not stand fully on its own.
Finding common interests with China is of great importance for Israel, and a meeting between the heads of state at this time can promote this. In spite of China’s traditional support for the Arab line and its energy ties with the Muslim states, it credits Israel with several important assets. One is that Israel holds one of the main keys to stability in the region, an issue in which China has much interest; another is that the events of the Arab Spring have demonstrated that Israel is an island of stability in the heart of a volatile region.
In addition, Israel is an important source of knowledge about events in a region in which China often feels at a loss. Israel is also seen in China as a source of advanced technologies, and China has an interest in promoting its science and technology ties with Israel, and perhaps even energy ties as Israel’s natural gas industry develops. Finally, while China no longer believes, as it once did, that Israel has unlimited influence in Washington, it does feel that strengthening its relationship with Jerusalem would be a sign that it gradually is coming to possess a foothold in the region, while somewhat offsetting, and perhaps even undermining, American political influence there.
Under these circumstances, Netanyahu’s visit to China provides a significant opportunity that should not be missed. One way, in fact, to miss the opportunity would be to place too much emphasis on the Iranian issue. The importance of the Iranian threat is clear and certainly Israel must do everything it can to thwart it, including raising the issue with China’s new top leaders.
However, the issue has been discussed in recent years at every significant meeting between the states, and more than once it has taken up the lion’s share of the agenda while pushing aside topics that—from China’s point of view—are no less important. Consequently, if Israel makes Iran the main focus of discussion, China’s will take this to mean that strengthening bilateral ties is not of primary importance to Israel; rather, from Israel’s perspective, China’s importance is limited to promoting Israel’s security interests.
Therefore, discussions should be balanced between subjects important to Israel (Iran), topics important to China, and to bilateral relations between the states.
First and foremost, Israel should demonstrate to China that it is interested in promoting bilateral relations, and that to this end it is prepared to help, with its limited capabilities, to further China’s interests in the Middle East. Specific issues that can be raised in this context are promoting Chinese investments in Israel (an interest of both countries) and establishing formal and semi-formal high level dialogues between the two states. As for the China-Israel-United States triangle, Israel can make it clear to China that while its technological ties will remain subject to the framework of understandings between Jerusalem and Washington, it is working to promote its activities with China in a wide variety of non-sensitive areas.
Finally, in light of China’s desire to play a more visible role in Middle Eastern politics, Israel can suggest that China participate in various international frameworks connected to the Middle East and discuss with it burning regional developments, such as Syria. Mahmoud Abbas’ visit to Beijing at the same time as Netanyahu also invites a discussion of China’s possible contribution to progress on the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Placing these issues on the table would convey Israel’s recognition of China’s rising status and its increasing importance in the region, and would make it possible to express Israel’s concerns and expectations to China in a more balanced manner.
Finally, more than any other Israeli politician, Benjamin Netanyahu is identified with the close US-Israel relationship. This likely leads China to assume that he would refrain from taking significant steps to promote relations with China so as not to arouse the displeasure of the United States, which, since its decisive action against Sino-Israeli security relations, has been perceived as an impediment to their further development. In addition, Netanyahu has not played a significant role in the development of relations in the past, and on two occasions he canceled planned visits to China. On the other hand, it was during Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister that an agreement was signed, later canceled, to provide the Phalcon early warning system to China. Netanyahu was not involved in canceling the deal, nor was he involved in another security crisis between Israel and China in 2004-2005. Thus in spite of his limited role in the development of relations, his “balance sheet” is positive. This has been especially noticeable in recent years given his moves to promote economic and diplomatic ties between the two countries. His intentions to include Chinese companies in large infrastructure projects in Israel, for example, are known, as is his instruction to ministers in his government during a time of budget cuts to reduce official trips to every country except China. Therefore, despite his commitment to ties with the United States, Netanyahu’s contribution to relations with China is largely positive, and the planned visit can help bolster this dynamic.
Laura,
As a Jewish nationalist, I value military and political relationships with non-democracies such as China and Russia, whose governments cannot be swayed by propaganda campaigns mounted by international pressure groups. It is my contention that Islam across all southern Asia shall always be greater threat to China and Russia than Jewish nationalism. Unlike the weaklings who run the United States of America, the tough, tight-knit and secretive leaderships of China and Russia have no problems whatsoever ordering the large-scale massacres, territorial expulsions and other methods of control when dealing with recalcitrant or threatening Islamic population groups. When seriously threatened, they shoot to kill. Americans only palaver with those kinds of people, and uselessly at that.
It should be no secret to you by now that I never have trusted democracy as a principle of government, here in the United States and certainly in the State of Israel. The kind of Israel that I want for the future would be a strongly-focused nationalist government that would share power with nobody, and would treat the rest of the world in accordance with the most opportunistic standards.
I never have been a communist or socialist, but I had highest possible respect for the regime of Josef Stalin, whom I regarded then as well as now as the greatest national commander of World War II for having had the foresight to build up the the levels of militarily-useful industrialization of the Soviet Union to the world’s second largest economy. Without Stalin and his massive and tough armies, the Nazi war machine never would have or could have been smashed. In comparison, our role in destroying Hitler’s vast military empire was strictly peripheral.
Yes, the American people support Israel. But what exactly does that get Israel in the face of an all but endless string of American leaderships who, throughout my long life, have treated the Jewish state as an all but negligible entity, which not a few of them were prepared to write off? I do not trust this government any longer to serve the people of the United States, to say nothing of whatever you imagine they would do for the State of Israel if push comes to shove. If you imagine otherwise, then it is you who are the fool.
And in any case, countries such as China and Russia will be united and rising powers that probably will dominate the world if and when this country cracks into English-speaking and Spanish-speaking segments.
All that I write here probably sounds implacable and cold-blooded to your mentality. But my way of thinking is based on the objective realities of any given situation.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
You are a fool if you think close relations with the chinks will be beneficial for Israel. You are merely advocating trading one outside power for another. They will use Israel for technological and economic benefit but will side with Israel’s enemies. At least the American people support Israel.
Few newsworthy ietms could be more pleasing to me then solid information of growing political, economic and military cooperation between the State of Israel and China.
With the reappearance and expansion of of multiple global power centers such as China, Russia, India and Germany, the hegemony of the USA and the rest of the English-speaking world is being compelled to deal with the realities of less than total power over the destinies of the rest of the nations and their separate civilizational zones. Israel plainly needs a close and strong relationship with one or more great powers other than the USA. But China will never completely trust an Israel that allows itself to be treated as a lapdog by the now-fading power center in Washington. One way that can be accomplished, probably in a single day and even in a single hour, will be the all-out military and possibly scientific coup de main that Israel must mount against Iran’s growing strategic nuclear weapons threat; it being clearly understood that the USA under Obama or any other American president will ever mount a pre-emptive attack against either North Korea or Iran, and irrespective of consideration that failure to initiate such an act probably will result in the certain nuclear destruction of the Jewish state. Israel on its own must mount that effort and it must be complete and successful.
Once that has happened, the pre-emptive act will clearly be seen as strongest evidence that the Jewish nation and the Jewish state will stop at nothing in pursuit of Jewish survival in its own ancient homeland. And China — he great China whose people or peoples have existed in its vast homeland probably even longer than the Jewish nation that sprang from the loins of Avraham our original father — Great China will understand all this the moment it happens. And from that time forward, Israel will achieve and keep the balance of international relations that it has for so long needed.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI