Despite the United States’ efforts to galvanize the West against China, competing interests between America and its closest democratic allies abound. The state of Israel is no exception: As Israel continues to develop its burgeoning, US$18 billion bilateral trade relationship with China, its international ports at Haifa and Ashdod remain persistent flashpoints between Israeli and American security experts.
Since Chinese companies acquired contracts to construct and/or operate some of the harbors’ major shipping terminals as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, coverage of the ports has permeated story after story on the US-Israel-China triangle.
Salient though the harbors may be, the constant attention the ports command places undue emphasis on the role of Israel’s maritime infrastructure in China’s Middle Eastern scheme. Scrutiny should instead focus on Israel’s technological cooperation with China, an issue that constitutes a significantly greater hazard for national and international security.
The central argument officials like former US ambassador Dan Shapiro and retired US Admiral Gary Roughead present against China’s presence at the ports – particularly the Haifa port – concerns the US Sixth Fleet, America’s naval presence in the Mediterranean.
Although the fleet’s headquarters are at Naples, Italy, it refuels at Haifa three to four times annually. But in 2014, the Shanghai International Port Group (SIPG) won the tender to build and operate the Haifa Bayport Terminal until 2045.
Companies like SIPG have relationships with the Communist Party of China (CPC): Under China’s authoritarian capitalist system, the state owns major corporations and conglomerates. This direct connection makes potential collaboration with China’s People’s Liberation Army possible, meaning SIPG could outfit the harbor with informants, technology, and software to survey American naval vessels as they dock.
SIPG could forward the information it gathers to the CPC, thereby undermining US military capabilities by providing the PLA valuable operational information on American military movements and systems.
How could an ostensibly “ironclad” ally advance such a brazen security blunder?
This question requires a concurrent explanation from the US Navy as to why the USS O’Kane, USS Jason Durham, and USS Forrest Sherman visited Haifa in 2021 and 2022, several months after SIPG began its operations.
The question also requires a response to another related query: Why does the United States undermine Shapiro’s and Roughead’s argument consistently in East Asia by docking at Chinese harbors and at the harbors of nations in security partnerships with China?
If Chinese port presence is a threat to American ships, a US Coast Guard cutter’s recent request to dock at a port in the China-aligned Solomon Islands “to refuel and reprovision” (emphasis added) – precisely the activity occurring at Haifa – was imprudent. Attempts to dock in Hong Kong (which, ironically, the Chinese denied) further erode the contention.
It is certainly possible that US ships in East Asia are qualitatively different from those in the Mediterranean region. For example, the US Navy could outfit the Sixth Fleet with classified technologies because the waters are “friendlier,” though Russia’s “expansive ambitions” to thwart NATO’s regional supremacy and Iran’s growing proximity to the Mediterranean may alter the playing field. But absent qualitative knowledge of the ships, it makes little sense for the United States to critique its stalwart partner.
This is not to say that the US and Israel should not take security measures over Haifa Port refueling. Joint coordination prior to the Sixth Fleet’s arrival at Haifa could mitigate against Chinese intelligence gathering. Israel could implement screenings of Haifa harbor employees, and offer preferred hiring to Israeli nationals and naval reservists with requisite security experience. Israel could clean up Chinese software used to operate the terminal, or replace the software altogether with an innocuous Israeli program.
Additionally, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) could require all foreign nationals – particularly Chinese harbor managers – to vacate the harbor when the fleet arrives and could implement security measures to prevent IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) catchers from coming in range of the port to collect cellular data.
Alternatively, US officers could simply turn their phones off.
Naturally, the suggestions above are wholly non-exhaustive: Editorials seldom do justice to policy papers and military coordination. The main takeaway is that there are workable solutions to ease any anxiety Americans harbor over the ports. Ultimately, concrete and girders are only capable of reinforcing docks, not of gathering intelligence.
A second argument editorialists like Matthew Rochat and Dubi Ben-Gedalyahu offer holds that the ports at Haifa and Ashdod play into China’s global maritime network. Rush Doshi correctly observes China’s efforts to “blunt” US naval activity near Chinese waters and to “build” international credibility through economic statecraft to achieve its policy aims.
It is also evident that China has taken a page from Alfred Thayer Mahan in ascribing strategic importance to the world’s oceans. Michael Doran and Peter Rough note China’s establishment of its first foreign naval base in Djibouti, as well as China’s conversion of Pakistan’s Gwadar Port into a hybrid commercial-military entity. Those harbors sit respectively on or near the Bab el-Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz, both chokepoints critical to international commerce.
Strategic asymmetry
Were Ashdod or Haifa of such significance as Gwadar, the claim that the Israeli harbors pose a threat to global trade might hold water. But China already owns or administers ports elsewhere in the Levantine Basin that are significantly more consequential than Israel’s, including at East Port Said near the mouth of the Suez Canal, at Piraeus near mainland Europe, and at Tripoli and Alexandria.
Though Haifa may handle almost 30 million tons of cargo annually, ports like Alexandria handle almost double that amount. And while it is true that the Chinese “Red-Med” railway connecting Eilat to Ashdod provides a land-based alternative to the Suez Canal, a track limits any “strategic depth” access the railroad may provide to China. Whereas a freight train can only haul 300 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) from station to station, a cargo ship can carry up to 80 times as much as a train from port to port.
In conjunction with the fact that Israel has closed off the remainder of the Haifa port from China by awarding a privatized Indian company the tender under US pressure, limiting China’s tonnage “control,” it is safe to assume that Haifa and Ashdod are relatively small economic cogs in China’s blueprints for a gargantuan maritime engine.
Why, then, has port fever gripped America’s defense establishment? The answer lies in a fundamental asymmetry between US and Israeli grand strategies.
Washington sees itself in a new great-power competition with Beijing, and seeks to minimize any influence that might give China a leg up on the international stage. That sentiment has been consistent across recent presidential administrations, with mutual recognition from Trump and Biden officials that the effort to bring China into the liberal order through economic integration – the so-called “harmonic convergence” theory – is now defunct.
The United States therefore aims to prevent China from expanding its economic footprint in all corners of the world, especially in Western-aligned nations like Israel that must be reliable if a cold war commences.
In contrast to the United States, profit motivates Israel’s China strategy. Israeli China expert Assaf Orion writes that Israel carries an explicit “few expectations, few disappointments” political attitude toward China, and that “the purpose of the Israeli government’s policy in Israel-China relations is to maximize the potential China bears to advance Israel’s economy.”
A tiny Israel may not be a major trading partner for an enormous China, but access to a 1.4-billion-person market has made China Israel’s third-largest trading partner behind the European Union and the US. Trade that adds to China negligibly strengthens America’s ally considerably.
What is not negligible is Israel’s cooperation with the CPC on technology. Israel’s swelling economic muscle must not come at the cost of vigilance toward the role it may play in the global security threat China poses. Countering China’s technological interest in Israel must drive American and Israeli policymakers’ discourse.
If, as Steven Simon suggests,“petroleum, profits, and prestige” drive China’s interests in the Middle East, Israel falls neatly into the “profits” bucket. Barring eventual Chinese interest in Israel’s Leviathan and Tamar gas fields, the Jewish state has neither the energy production of nations like Iran and Saudi Arabia (see Golda Meir on Israel) nor the relative geographic significance of other “prestigious” chokepoint ports.
China’s ambition to become a technological behemoth by 2035 therefore suggests that it is appropriate for the United States to anchor its security coordination with Israel on technology, an issue the US Naval War College Review admits is “more relevant” than port structure.
To be sure, Israeli shipments of military technology to China are no longer of great concern. The Phalcon and Harpy controversies of the early 2000s – in which Israel canceled military deals with China for radar detection planes and unmanned aerial vehicles over fears that both platforms contained clandestine American military technology – prompted Israel’s Ministry of Defense to create a Defense Exports Control Agency in 2006 and to terminate its defense relations with China.
Innovative Comprehensive Partnership
Rather, civilian technology in both the private and public sectors remains the key issue. Israel understands that the Chinese marketplace has become ever more agonistic. To stay competitive, Israel’s government has developed an “Innovative Comprehensive Partnership” (ICP) with China over the past decade.
The partnership promotes government collaboration between the nations’ patents offices and Ministries of Science and Technology, strengthens university research, facilitates an “exchange of experts” on entrepreneurship, and streamlines technology-company acquisition. The ICP makes Israel the only country with an innovation partnership with China at a “senior level,” indicating that the Chinese prize Israel’s tech scene enough to give Israel priority in the Chinese market.
As monetarily enticing as this “win-win” arrangement may seem, several major problems with the ICP status quo exist.
In collaborating with China, Israel risks losing its comparative advantage as the “startup nation.” Were China to develop an innovative prowess akin to Israel’s through acquiring Israeli companies or realizing a similar startup culture at home, it could out-price and outcompete the small nation through sheer economics of scale.
Israel also risks giving China technology that is adaptable for authoritarian purposes. While some Israeli products such as NSO’s powerful Pegasus spyware are overtly problematic, seemingly unobjectionable products may be applicable to China’s security apparatus.
As Yoram Evron notes, technology companies in sectors like aerospace and telecommunications have become “important source[s] of advanced technology for China’s military modernization.”
Similarly, Israel’s position as a semiconductor research powerhouse indirectly undermines America’s CHIPS Act, bipartisan legislation boosting US semiconductor production capabilities to lessen global reliance on China.
Finally, Israel might soon face many of the same intellectual property (IP) woes that have plagued the US-China trade relationship if it loses leverage in the partnership. Though it is difficult to appraise the costs of IP theft, the US National Bureau on Asian Research emphasizes mainland China’s and Hong Kong’s major role in counterfeiting, appropriating trade secrets, and illegally reproducing software.
Because China and Chinese companies can become intimately familiar with budding Israeli technology through the ICP, Israel has in effect put a target on its back.
Focus on tech dialogue
Fortunately, a conversational shift toward technology is in progress. A recent Newsweek cover story highlights that China views Israel as a pivotal technological superpower it wishes to exploit. Further, US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid have introduced a new channel for “high-level dialogue” on the relationship between new technologies and security interests. Both are positive signals that the American media and Israeli government identify technology as pivotal.
Still, many Israelis in relevant policy and economic positions have been either lethargic or reticent in their responses to the China threat. The Newsweek article quoted the president of the Israel-China & Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce as dismissing America’s definition of “strategic technologies” as “cover[ing] everything other than toilet paper, I guess.” Charmin does not produce four-ply advanced circuit boards.
Both Israel and the United States recognized the China problem a mere five years ago, and neither nation should blame the other for failing to realize it sooner. Nonetheless, the US-Israel conversation on China requires substantial reframing.
America must recognize that every policy choice carries risk, but that some risks are far greater than others. Just as America did in its decades-long confrontation with the Soviet Union, it should grant its allies leeway if an issue, such as Israel’s maritime infrastructure, is less pertinent.
Concurrently, Israel must make itself available to the United States’ technological security interests and re-evaluate its own partnerships with China.
All told, the two covenantal nations must remain steadfast partners in an ever-perilous world.