For over seventy-five years, Israel and China have circled each other in one of modern diplomacy's least understood relationships-and never alone. Washington has always been in the room.
This is the history of a relationship forged in the shadows: two ancient civilizations and very different states, each seeking advantages from the other, each willing to look past ideology when the rewards were real. Israel courted China in the 1950s and was rebuffed; China turned its back through the Mao years; then, from the 1970s, a quiet trade in technology and expertise began to bloom-until, again and again, American pressure forced a reckoning.
Drawing on a career spent inside these events, Eyal Propper traces the full arc, from missed early openings through to the establishment of formal relations in 1992, through crises and investments, the Trump trade war, and the fallout from October 2023. The result is both a largely untold chapter of statecraft and a sharp lens on the defining contest of our age: how smaller nations navigate a world increasingly shaped by the rivalry between Beijing and Washington.