Immediately after its foundation, the young state of Israel enjoyed a wide international recognition. Although this recognition did not extend to the Arab or Muslim worlds, nonetheless in Asia and Africa, Israel was regarded as a young successful state that could help with the process of decolonisation and modernisation. As for the Western world, Israel enjoyed support from governments, and a high level of popularity among the common people, as its creation was seen as the moral and just response to the horrors of the Holocaust.
Turkey was the only Muslim country that established diplomatic ties with Israel and the one exception in Europe that did not was Franco’s Spain, which Israel shunned due to the dictator’s past connections to Nazi Germany. On the other hand, Israel was quick to recognise West Germany as the new and legitimate Germany. It was highly important to the West, and West Germany, to obtain an Israeli legitimisation after the Holocaust. If the Jewish State recognised a ‘new Germany’ then it was easy to justify West Germany’s swift return to the family of civilised nations. The Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, in return secured a huge amount of German reparations that helped to put the new economy (and army) on a solid foundation as I have described in the relevant chapter on Israel’s political economy.1
Until 1967, Israel had cordial relationship with the Soviet Union until the outbreak of the June 1967 war. There were also tense periods before that, but Israel maintained contact with the USSR through the Israeli Communist Party. However, after the 1967 war and throughout the Cold War, Israel was identified as one of the West’s most loyal allies in the region. This led to full cessation of diplomatic relations with almost all the Eastern bloc countries following the Soviet suit; apart from Romania and Yugoslavia (the former allowed to pursue its own foreign policies, the latter, insisting on doing so more defiantly under the leadership of Marshal Tito who regarded himself as one of the leaders of a non-aligned bloc of states which wished to be neutral in the Cold War between the East and the West).
The fall of the USSR in the 1980s opened a new chapter in the relationship between Israel and Russia and the former ex-Soviet bloc countries. The Russian decision to allow its Jewish population to immigrate to Israel created an important electorate for Moscow inside Israel. As for the ex-Soviet bloc countries, many of them proved to be quite pro-Israeli in this century, when Israel’s international image was seriously damaged and eroded.
Some countries in the early years of statehood obeyed the Arab League’s call for boycotting Israel. Its impact on the Israeli economy was not significant as most countries refused to abide by the request and the American aid balanced any potential damage such a boycott could have inflicted. In the collective memory of Israelis of an older generation, the decision of U Nom, the Burmese Prime Minister, to establish formal relations with Israel in 1955 is celebrated as a brave violation of the boycott since quite a few countries in South-East Asia were reluctant to do so.
The 1967 war transformed Israel into a regional power and a mini-empire also in the state’s own self-image. Much of the international sympathy dwindled, and the on-going conflict with the Palestinians led to complicated relationships with the political elites around the world that hitherto were unconditionally pro-Israeli.
The first sign that something had changed in Israel’s international image appeared in the aftermath of the 1973 war. Technically, the Israeli forces occupied part of Africa when they crossed the Suez Canal into Egypt proper during the last days of the fighting in this war. Although they did not stay for long there, their presence deteriorated Israel’s relations with the continent. Moreover, Israel’s unconditional support for Apartheid South Africa further complicated relations with many African nations and they remained on a very low-key until the fall of the South African regime in the late 1980s. The African member states in the UN were behind a General Assembly resolution in 1975 that equated Zionism with racism (Resolution 3379, November 1975). In this century, most of these countries re-established their diplomatic relations with Israel. Arms trade, Israeli economic aid and the disappearance of the more progressive leaderships reopened the way for Israel into Africa. The exception was post-Apartheid South Africa led by the ANC, which has traditionally supported the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel.
In the last decades of the 20th century, Israel established strong strategic and economic ties with many countries in the world. Its main problem, however, lay in its diminishing international image; a process that commenced in earnest in the wake of the 1982 war in Lebanon (which official Israel calls ‘The Peace of the Galilee Operation’ and more popularly is referred to as the First Lebanon War). The images of that war reached every TV screen in the world and accentuated the sense of Israel as a victimiser and the Palestinians as victims. Since that year, Israel finds it difficult to maintain a positive image in world public opinion. There are two caveats to this statement: the first is that it enjoys a special status in the American global policy, and secondly that this eroded moral image does not always affect political elites’ attitudes, and even less economic and strategic ties between Israel and the rest of the world.
These two factors, the special relationship with the USA and the strategic alliances with other countries deserve a closer look, which is presented below before I attempt to evaluate the impact and importance of the more popular image of Israel in world public opinion.
Contrary to common perceptions of this relationship, it was not always a honeymoon and a friendly affair between the super power and its most loyal ally in the Middle East. Therefore, one should not adopt a teleological or determinist approach towards this relationship.
The beginning was very promising. The US did not wait long before recognising Israel, soon after the state was declared on May 15, 1948 (as did the USSR a few days later). It was in fact the first country to recognise Israel.
For a short moment, during the first year of statehood, it seemed that the Truman administration had grave concerns about Israel’s conduct and policies towards the Palestinian refugees (as noted before, 750,000 Palestinians became refugees in the wake of the 1948 war). During 1949, the USA expected Israel to allow the Palestinian refugees to return and when Israel refused, Washington’s indignation was translated to the imposition of sanctions on the Jewish State. However, a few years later, as the pressure eased and the Cold War intensified, the USA lost interest in the question and was more concerned with assuring Israel’s loyalty in the bipolar global and regional struggle and accordingly the relationship between the two states improved considerably.2
The significant turning point was the appointment of Lyndon B. Johnson as President in 1963 in the wake of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Until then, the US did not wish Israel to be associated with American policy in the Arab world and some of Israel’s operations and intentions were severely criticised by Washington. A famous manifestation of such a clash of interest was the American policy during the 1956 Suez crisis, when the US forced Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula it occupied in a joint attack with Britain and France. Another was the Middle East crisis of 1958, caused by a chain of successful revolutions in the Arab world. Israel wanted to exploit the tensions for a pre-emptive takeover of the West Bank, claiming that there was a danger that the Hashemite Kingdom in Jordan would fall into ‘radical’ hands. It was the firm American rejection of the plan that foiled it.3
The uneasy relationship led also to an American refusal to supply arms to Israel, and the Israeli army had to rely on France and Britain. This all changed when Johnson came to the White House. The weapons were delivered and ever since the mid-1960s, Israel enjoyed unconditional American support in the international arenas (it was particularly needed in the UN from the 1970s onwards, when many member states tried to pass resolutions condemning Israel’s policy in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip).
After the 1967 war, and under the Johnson administration, the bilateral relations improved enormously and have all the features which are recognised today: huge military assistance, generous financial aid, unconditional support in the international arenas and a close cultural relationship. It has not always been a smooth ride: there were (and will be) moments when the US felt it needed to pressure Israel and persuade it to agree to certain actions the US deemed in its own interests. One such strained moment came during the bilateral negotiations between Egypt and Israel that concluded the 1973 October war. Israel was slow to accept the deal of total withdrawal from the 1967 occupied Sinai Peninsula in return for long armistice (which in the end led to peace).4 American pressure was quite heavy and effective. However, overall, ever since 1967, Israel’s special status in the USA was consolidated and reached new heights.
One possible way of looking at this special relationship is to view the American policy towards Israel as leaning on a three-legged stool. Each leg represents a lobby and together it seems that since 1967, these three lobbies work on behalf of Israel in Washington and ensure that American policy does not deviate from its traditional support.
The first leg is the AIPAC, the pro-Israeli lobby (its full name is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee). It was founded during the 1950s by a joint initiative of Israeli diplomats working in the UN (such as the ambassador Abba Eban) and Jewish trade unionists who were apprehensive about the direction American policy was taking in those days under the Truman and Eisenhower administrations.
Its method was very simple. It targeted politicians in the beginning of their career, promised them help, and if turned down, the lobby would support their rivals. In such a way, it had a powerful alliance of members in both houses of Congress, in both parties. A clear proof of Israel’s omnipotent presence in Washington is the fact that incumbent presidents and candidates will always attend AIPAC’s annual conference together with the economic and political elite of the nation. Quite often these politicians will heed the advice given to them by the lobby. In recent years, a very important book by two highly respected American political scientists, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, attributed even more power to the lobby than previously thought.5 Not everyone agrees with their analysis, however very few dispute AIPAC’s enormous influence or its ability to continuously maintain Israel’s unique status as America’s best ally in the Middle East.
However, this lobby lost some of its influence and power during the days of the Obama administration (President Barack Obama’s term lasted between 2008 and 2016). AIPAC failed in obtaining one of its major targets during Obama’s second term when it attempted to prevent a deal with Iran. The Iran nuclear deal framework, as it was officially named, was a preliminary framework between Iran and a group of world powers, all of them permanent members of the UN Security Council, headed by the USA. In the agreement, Iran consented to redesign, convert and reduce its nuclear facilities and in return the West would lift it economic sanctions on Iran.
Israel recruited AIPAC to try and foil the deal through Capitol Hill but failed. AIPAC is still nonetheless a powerful actor, maybe destined to have new life under the Trump administration, but an overview shows a decline in its capacity to impact on American policy. The appearance of a more liberal Jewish lobby group, J Street, leaning more towards the left-wing parties in Israeli politics, undermined AIPAC’s influence even further.
The second leg of the stool is the Christian Zionist lobby. Christian Zionism is a relatively old phenomenon and dates back to the early 19th century. It was endorsed as a theological dogma by evangelical churches on both sides of the Atlantic.6
The dogma was and still is quite simplistic and straightforward. It is incumbent on Christians to promote ‘the return’ of the Jews to Palestine and assist them in creating a Jewish State there. The ‘return’ of the Jews is seen as part of a divine scheme that would precipitate the second coming of the Messiah and resurrection of the dead.7
At first, official Israel was reluctant to employ them as allies in the USA. In the divine scheme, in the end of the days, Jews were expected to convert to Christianity or roast in hell. Moreover, these churches did not wait to doomsday for this conversion and were quite active in their attempt to proselyte Jews in Israel.
In 1992, when Benjamin Netanyahu was the Israeli ambassador to the UN, he cultivated good relationship with these groups and they became a very important factor in maintaining the pro-Israeli policies of the USA, ever since. In the 21st century, in many ways this Christian Zionist lobby became more important for Israel than AIPAC. Israel allowed it also for the first time free space in the Jewish State (where according to the law of the land proselytising actions are prohibited).
The third leg of the stool is the military industrial complex and its various lobbies on Capitol Hill and which has its own ideological powerhouses in the neo-conservative think-tanks. Israel receives more than 3 billion dollars a year from the USA for military aid and other expenditures.8 Part of the money is meant to go back to the USA for purchase of American arms. Therefore, the military industry has an interest in keeping Israel as a close ally and collaborates with the highly developed Israeli military industry. Lately, another sector in this lobby, the Home Security branch of the government, cultivated close ties with Israeli experts on how to manage security in airports and how to counter insurgency in places where American troops were stationed since 2003. However, this same arms industry also has important clients in the Arab world, which sometimes can turn it into a less pro-Israeli factor in the overall matrix that produces American policy towards Israel.
These three lobbies provided Israel with essential material aid and protected it in times of crisis. Until recently, the American support was also crucial in Israel’s diplomatic battles. However, notwithstanding this robust American support, Israel’s international image and standing began to deteriorate and for a while had influenced also the official American policy.
This deterioration was triggered by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. The invasion was televised and reported worldwide. In that year, the UN convened a special inquiry commission to look into the Israeli actions on the ground, chaired by the renowned Irish human rights lawyer, Seán MacBride. The commission’s report accused Israel of a series of war crimes in Lebanon. The UN did not discuss the report eventually, due to American pressure, and there were no real repercussions for Israel. However, it tilted public opinion in the world against Israel. This negative view was reinforced by a global media consensus that Israel was responsible for the massacre of the refugees in Sabra and Shatila, perpetrated by their Phalangist allies.
The outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987 aggravated matters even more. The image of unarmed children facing with stones soldiers armed with lethal weapons caused a change in public opinion perceptions even in the USA. It is possible that the First Intifada led to the most significant change in the PLO’s international standing that had a direct impact on Israel’s position in the international system. In 1988, the USA began direct negotiations with the PLO that led to its inclusion in the peace talks about a solution in Palestine and, through that, de-terrorising the organisation’s image as a terror group.
This was backdrop for a short-lived dent imprinted in the otherwise rosy picture of Israel’s relationship with the USA. The concurrence of the first Gulf War in 1991 (when Saddam Hussein led his army into Kuwait and was repelled by an international coalition led by the USA) with the new determination of the George Bush Sr. administration to find a breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli conflict, produced an unprecedented crisis in Israel’s relations with the USA. The American administration coerced Israel to take part in a peace conference in Madrid in that year, alongside other Arab countries and a joint Palestinian-Jordanian delegation. The Yitzhak Shamir government, a right-wing coalition, reluctantly took part in the conference without any desire to change the status quo in the occupied territories. The conference thus failed but the administration regarded the Israeli Judaisation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as the main obstacle for progress in the peace process. Thus, when the conference ended in total failure, the American administration cast the blame on Israel and its settlement policies.
The fences were mended during the days of the Oslo Accord and the new President, Bill Clinton, did not show the same willingness as his Republican counterpart to pressure Israel into a more accommodating policy. He could do this because, among other things, the Oslo process created the impression that this time a new government in Israel, the Rabin government, was seriously making an effort to find a solution to the Palestine question.
Israel recognised the PLO in 1993; until then it regarded the organisation as an illegitimate terrorist organisation. The international recognition of the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people meant that there was now a Palestinian body that could demand the creation of a Palestinian state over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (while putting on hold, or jettisoning (time will tell), the aspiration to liberate Palestine as a whole).
For a short moment, Israel’s international image was slightly repaired and this was due to the Oslo process that commenced in 1993. The mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO, which led to more full-blown negotiations over a final settlement for the conflict, brought many dividends to Israel, as long as the process was alive.
Israel opened legations in some of the Arab countries, Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994 and foreign investments grew as peace looked like a real option. This was, however, a short-lived honeymoon with the Arab world. After the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin in November 1995 and in the wake of another desperate Palestinian wave of terror, the peace process collapsed.
After Rabin’s assassination, the Labour government was replaced by right-wing Likud party head, Benjamin Netanyahu, whose policies could have led to further deterioration in Israel’s international image had it not been for the events of 9/11 in the United States. World public opinion, and this time also friendly governments, pressured Israel to stop building settlements in the occupied territories and allow the peace process to be revitalised. The pressure was ineffective since the growing frequency and threat of what was deemed as ‘Islamic terror’, created for a short while an association in the perceptions of various sections in the American and Western political systems between the Palestinian struggle and these fundamentalist groups such as al-Qaeda that perpetrated the attacks on US soil in 9/11.
Israel’s international image was further improved under the Sharon governments (2001 and 2003). While Sharon was associated with harsh, inflexible policies towards the Palestinians in the past, he emerged in the 21st century as a reborn peace advocate; in particular in his second term in office when he even created a new party, Kadima, to dissociate himself from the right-wing Likud. He was still pursuing a very harsh policy towards the Palestinians during the Second Intifada until Arafat’s death in 2004, but his image changed due to his decision to evict the Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and he was engaged in what we now know was quite a futile, renewed diplomatic effort led by the George Bush Jr. administration.
This effort continued also in the days of Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert, after Sharon fell into a coma. Some historians believe that during the years 2007 and 2008 there was a real, and maybe a last, chance for reaching an Israeli-Palestinian understanding over the two-state solution (namely the establishment of a Palestinian state over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip next to Israel), had it not been for the entanglement of Olmert in a corruption trial that saw him eventually sent to jail.
However, this assessment ignores what happened in the Gaza Strip in the days following the eviction of the Jewish settlers from there. The chain of events this eviction triggered contributed more than anything else to a further deterioration in Israel’s international image. In essence, looking back at the whole decade between 2005 and 2015, it becomes quite obvious that the diplomatic effort was totally detached from the reality on the ground. While the diplomats were negotiating, Israel continued to settle Jews in the West Bank and maintained its iron and ruthless grip over the Palestinian population there with a matrix of checkpoints, arrests without trial, collective punishment and demolition of houses. The eviction of the settlers from the Gaza Strip did not seem to ease life in either the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, in fact it made it worse for the Palestinians living there.
Indeed, the eviction, or the disengagement as it was named, was a grand Israeli gesture towards peace with the Palestinians. In hindsight, it seems quite clear that this was meant to strengthen the Israeli hold over the West Bank, while easing the pressure on the army who found it almost impossible to defend the small settlers’ enclave, Gush Qatif, at the heart of the Gaza Strip.
However, at the time there was a sense that the engagement was part of a re-awakening of Israel’s peace camp. The eviction in 2005 was accompanied by violent resistance from the settlers and was fully supported by the Israeli peace camp. It was hailed in the world as an important move towards peace. What happened next, is not something Sharon anticipated and when it occurred Israel’s international image sunk once more to an ebb in which it remains, at least among the civil society in the world, if not necessarily among governments.
The Israeli government, as well as the Western governments, hoped that after the Israeli eviction the Palestinian Authority would take over the rule of the Gaza Strip. However, the elections there have brought the Hamas to power and the Israeli reaction was to impose a land siege and naval blockade on the Strip.
The Hamas reacted with launching rockets into Israel in 2006 (this coincided more or less with the abduction of three Israeli soldiers in South Lebanon that triggered the second Lebanon war between Hezbollah and Israel). Israel reacted to both assaults with unprecedented brutality and it was a downhill story ever since.
In 2009, 2012 and 2014 Israel instigated attacks on the Gaza Strip in retaliation for the firing of missiles from the Gaza Strip into Israel. Thousands of Palestinian citizens were killed in these attacks and many more were wounded and lost their homes. The attacks coupled with the continued siege created a situation described by the UN as leading to a human catastrophe in the near future.9
The recurrent attacks on Gaza, televised worldwide, reinforced the criticism on Israel about its treatment of the Palestinians not only there but also in the West Bank. An International Solidarity Movement (ISM) has despatched to Palestine large groups of young Europeans and Americans who watch, report and act on the behalf of the occupied Palestinians. This solidarity movement was one of the major indicators of the change of the attitude to Israel in the Western civil societies. In the 1960s and 1970s, young people such as these, came to volunteer in Israel’s Kibbutzim seeing it as one of the only havens of egalitarianism and socialism. In this century, the younger generation is coming to volunteer in the resistance to the Israeli occupation.
The peak of this non-governmental and social support for the Palestinians came with the inception of the BDS movement. This movement of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions is a citizens’ network targeting official ties between local academy, economy and cultural institutions with Israel. It scored some success when churches, trade unions and some companies withdrew their investments from Israel, artists cancelled their shows and local cultural centres shunned inviting Israelis.
This approach is still resisted by most of the governments worldwide, in some countries such as France, even an anti-BDS legislation was attempted. At first, also the Palestinian Authority did not support this line of action; although recently it sponsored some of its actions.
Israel reacted by alleging that this is a new anti-Semitism; an allegation that resonated with some but did not convince, for instance, the EU that imposed for the first time sanctions on goods produced in, and exported from, the Jewish colonies in the occupied territories.
The Obama administration in the USA, towards the end of its term, took a very harsh view towards Israel’s settlement policy and did not veto, as it usually does, a strong anti-Israeli Security Council condemnation of the Israeli settlement policy in December 2016. However, at the moment the incumbent President Donald Trump promised to reverse this new critical attitude. Time will tell whether indeed this is the case.
What offset this erosion in the international standing of Israel are strong ties with other important new actors on the international scene, such as India and China. These two new rising powers have a very functional approach towards Israel and seek to strengthen their economic and military ties with the Jewish State. Israel has also enjoyed so far almost unconditional support from the new member states of the EU in Central and Eastern Europe (countries such as Poland, Hungary and Lithuania to mention but three); a bizarre turn of events as the populations in these countries had a very dismal record during the Holocaust, or maybe this is the explanation for their support. However, the relationships with China and India are far more important in the grand scheme of things.
Out of the two countries, China is the most important one for Israel. In this century, the two countries developed strong strategic and in particular economic ties. Israel is seeking markets for it high-tech economy and Chinese businessmen and companies see Israel as a place in which they can buy companies and shares. China is Israel’s second top export destination after the USA and the top market for its export policies in Asia.10 There are more than 1,000 Israeli start-up companies operating in China today.
Recently, China’s industrial capabilities, particularly in manufacturing and construction, has enabled Chinese firms to take over some of Israel’s iconic industries (such as the dairy company Tnuva and the cosmetic company Ahava) and national projects (such as connecting the two sides of the city of Haifa with a long tunnel). Chinese investments in Israel are estimated at 15 billion US dollars by 2011. Major Chinese firms such as Bright Food and Fosun invested in a variety of Israeli industries and the trend continues today. The economic ties are also strengthened by joint academic ventures and Chinese institutions have donated over the years to Israeli universities.11
This relationship was boosted by an official economic trade agreement signed in July 2011. This opened the door for imaginative joint projects still to be materialised such as a high-speed rail link between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea to ease Chinese maritime export to Europe through the Gulf of Aqaba. By 2013, the trade between the two countries rose to 10 billion dollars and it is still growing. In March 2015, Israel joined China’s newly constituted Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), becoming a founding member of the institution and suggesting that Israel may become a major economic ally of China.12
India used to be identified with non-alignment policies in the 1950s and the 1960s and thus was a supporter of liberation struggles around the world, including in Palestine. This has changed in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1997, for the first time an Israeli president officially visited India indicating the onset of a new kind of relationship between the two states.
The relationship with India centred more around military cooperation than economic or trade ties. The defence industry in Israel is a strategic ally of the Indian army, selling it advanced technology and weapons (estimated at 600 million dollars in 2016), making Israel the second largest source of defence equipment for India, after Russia. Both countries share intelligence ventures (based on Islamophobia and counter insurgency operations connected to the Palestinian struggle in the occupied territories and the liberation struggle in Kashmir, respectively).13
Such successes mean that materially the Jewish State is quite secure. However, it does not help to stop the erosion in its moral image. The fact that Israel invests huge sums of money to improve the image, indicates how important this aspect is in the eyes of its politicians. However, all and all, the huge investment Israel puts into its external image cannot change the fact that its protracted occupation of the West Bank and its siege of the Gaza Strip will continue to undermine its international standing and the state will, at least diplomatically, rely mainly on the backing of the USA.
However, there were warning signs that even American support is not always secured. The tense relations between the Israeli government and President Barack Obama were caused not only by tactical issues but exposed potential deeper disagreements. As this book goes to print, the new Trump administration begins with promises to be the most pro-Israeli administration in years. Time will tell if indeed this is the case. In the meantime, Israel’s international image continues to deteriorate.
I would like to finish this book by focusing on this image, as it is the main cause for such a big interest in this state’s history. I chose to do it through the struggle over the state’s international reputation as has been conceived on the ground by the Israeli policy makers themselves, which I hope will highlight how significant images and perceptions are for a state like Israel, beyond the more objective features of a state’s sustainability which is secured by military power, economic stability and natural resources.
1 Michael Wolffsohn, Eternal Guilt?: Forty Years of German-Jewish Relations, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
2 I have discussed in Ilan Pappe, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951, London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1998.
3 See Ilan Pappe, ‘The Junior Partner: Israel’s Role in the 1958 Crisis’ in Wm. Roger Louis and Roger Owen (eds.), A Revolutionary Year; the Middle East in 1958, London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2002, pp. 245–274..
4 Others are mentioned in the first and second chapters of this book.
5 John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israeli Lobby and US Foreign Policy, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006.
6 Stephen Sizer, Christian Zionism: Roadmap to Armageddon?, London: IVP Press, 2004.
7 Ibid.
8 In September 2016, the US gave Israel a 38 billion dollar package see ‘US 38B$ Military Aid to Israel Package Sends a Message’, USA Today, 14 September, 2016.
9 UN News Centre, ‘Gaza Could Become Uninhabitable in less than Five Years Due to On-going De-development’, 1 September, 2015.
10 David Isenberg, ‘Israel’s Role in China’s New Warplane’, Asia Times, 4 December, 2002.
11 Maya Yarowsky, ‘With Strong Tech Ties, Is Israel’s China’s New Best Friend?’, No Camels.com (a website boasting Israel as a start-up nation), 3 May, 2015.
12 Ibid.
13 Martin Sherman, ‘India and Israel Forge a Solid Strategic Alliance’, The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, 7 November, 2006.