Victory in conflict requires mastery of two “balances”: First, the balance of power, and second, the balance of error, or making sure that you do not make the most mistakes, thus helping your enemy’s victory.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has made a decisive and potentially fatal error by making an enemy of the Jewish Nation, centered today in the State of Israel but historically one of the great civilizations extending back at least 3,000 years.
Mind you, no Israeli leader has ever publicly declared that “China is our enemy,” but on October 28, 2025, self-described Chinese People’s Armed Police (PAP) propaganda worker Zhao Da Shuai (趙大帥) stated on the “X” platform, in a post gaining over 132,000 views:
“People of the world needs [sic] to realize this; China’s liberation of Taiwan is part of the global struggle against Zionism.”
Why would this CCP-sanctioned wannabe Tokyo Rose, who is emerging as a leading CCP psywar bot on the X platform, conflate the destruction of a free Taiwan with the destruction of “Zionism,” code for Israel?
The answer has dimensions both historic and immediate — with Zhao’s post linking to the October 24-28 first ever visit to Taiwan of a 200-member strong delegation from The America-Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC), one of the most effective and powerful lobbying combines in Washington, D.C.
A political and recent indirect kinetic confrontation between the CCP and Israel has been long in the making, as has been the journey of AIPAC to Taipei — which now portends decisive strategic impact benefitting freedom in Taiwan, Israel and the world.
The CCP’s antipathy toward Israel started with Mao Zedong (毛澤東), who in March 1965 generated a crowd of 100,000 to greet the first visiting delegation from the Palestine Liberation Organization, and first promoted a pan-Arab-Palestinian alliance against Israel, saying:
“You are not only two million Palestinians facing Israel, but one hundred million Arabs. You must act and think along this basis.”
And likely during that visit Mao previewed a CCP objective of destroying Taiwan and Israel, saying: “Imperialism is afraid of China and the Arabs. Israel and Formosa [Taiwan] are the bases of imperialism in Asia… They created Israel for you and Formosa for us.”
Mao also warned of horrific casualties, saying, “I told them that peoples must not be afraid if their numbers are reduced in liberation wars... China lost twenty million people in the struggle for liberation.”
Mao’s dream of a pan-Arab coalition against Israel survived him, with organizing diplomacy occurring during the later term of CCP leader Jiang Zemin (江澤民) and under his successor Hu Jintao (胡錦濤).
This resulted in the first 2004 China-Arab States Cooperation forum, that by 2014 began discussions which would lead to incorporating the Belt and Road Initiative, and was elevated in 2022 to the first China-Arab States Summit of state leaders in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
While increasing its political support for the Palestinian cause, for most of this period the CCP also sought a profitable relationship with Israel.
The 1972 Nixon-Kissinger US rapprochement with China led to the beginning of arms sales discussions to counter the Soviet Union during the later Clinton Administration, which also saw Israel and China begin a significant arms sales relationship.
This included sales of Israeli Aircraft Industries Lavi fighter technology that became the Chengdu Aircraft Corporation J-10 fighter; sale of the Harpy anti-radar drone that serves today in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) as the ASN-301; and Phalcon phased-array airborne radar tech, which helped the Shaanxi KJ-2000 airborne early warning and control system (AWACS).
The latter arms sale spurred the later Clinton and early George W. Bush administrations into action, aided in this opposition by prominent Jewish-American voices like New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal, who in a March 17, 1992 column wrote: “Any arms sale to Communist China is contrary to Israel’s national interests and its status as a democratic country.”
In the late 1990s as this analyst accumulated research on foreign technology assisting PLA modernization while working with The Heritage Foundation think tank, a meeting there with AIPAC analysts yielded disagreements over the significance of Israeli military tech sales to China.
But in about a year these same analysts were agreeing with my concerns, while Israel had curtailed most military sales to China by the mid-2000s; today Israel remains one of the world’s most innovative developers of cutting-edge military technology, which could now benefit Taiwan.
But as Washington both lacked consensus regarding the CCP threat, and did not have anything approaching an integrated strategy for deterring or even ending the CCP threat, isolated anti-arms sales campaigns, which also included Europe, did little to prevent the CCP from massing superpower levels of economic and military power.
Under the current CCP leadership of Xi Jinping (習近平), which has accelerated the pursuit of another dream of Mao’s — global hegemony — there emerges a clearer parallel: the increasingly simultaneous prosecution of “Israel for you and Formosa for us.”
As the CCP built its political, economic and even military relationship power among Arab states, it also worked to turn the radical Islamist Mullah dictatorship in Iran into its main Middle East missile and future nuclear-armed proxy.
Chinese provision of military technology allowed Iran to build a massive missile and drone complex, while Chinese purchases of Iranian petroleum funded Iran’s nuclear weapons program and its supply of Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen, creating missile-armed terrorist proxies aimed at Israel.
In August 2022, Xi’s PLA initiated its first combined-arms missile, air, and naval blockade-to-invasion exercises around Taiwan, and about a year later China’s indirect support for a combined Hamas-Iran coalition allowed the commencement of its horrific Oct. 7, 2023 war against Israel — while CCP hate propaganda against Israel began in earnest.
Xi was likely betting that Iran would be building nuclear weapons by the time Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran would be delivering destruction, even defeat, against Israel — at least to the degree that the Arab coalition led by Saudi Arabia would recognize China as the primary Middle East power-political leader over the United States.
It is likely that the CCP was ready to reward such a shift by enabling leading Arab powers like Saudi Arabia to obtain Chinese nuclear weapons, directly or indirectly via Pakistan or North Korea.
But herein lies the CCP’s and Xi’s potentially fatal mistake: harkening back to the biblical Old Testament Book of Samuel battle of David versus Goliath, Israel has been a leading innovator in “asymmetric warfare” — ask the Egyptians, who learned this in 1967 and the Syrians, who learned in 1982.
Furthermore, Israel has never hesitated to use its strengths and take timely action against threats, from engineering the defections of Soviet combat aircraft that would populate Cold War US Aggressor Squadrons, to its January 2018 theft of an archive of Iranian nuclear program documents, to its uncanny ability to find active allies among the oppressed populations of enemy dictatorships.
It was this later talent that enabled Israel to manipulate Hezbollah into replacing its main communication pagers and radios with new models with small explosives, that on Sept. 17 last year were triggered, resulting in about 3,000 casualties, mainly injuries, literally hobbling Hezbollah’s threat.
Likewise, Israel’s 12-day war against Iran in June this year, that was primarily directed against Iran’s China-enabled nuclear program, was also used by Israel to attack Iran’s airpower, and with the help of many regime-oppressed Iranians, to direct attacks aimed at decapitating Iran’s political and military leadership.
Israel effectively cleared the way for US President Donald Trump’s successful June 22, 2025 US Air Force B-2 bomber attacks against many of Iran’s nuclear weapons development bases, setting back both Iran’s and China’s agenda for reshaping the power order of the Middle East.
But the CCP retaliated on a propitious anniversary, Sept. 17, 2025, by enabling a military alliance between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to be a nuclear weapons alliance by virtue of China’s decades of providing Pakistan with nuclear weapons and long-range missile technology — which may now include provision of intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) technology (or indirectly via North Korea).
So, while the administration of President William Lai Ching-te (賴清德) and AIPAC were likely formulating their schedule for many months, it is also propitious that the AIPAC delegation arrived in Taipei about a month after the formation of the China-enabled Saudi-Pakistan nuclear alliance.
The CCP’s desire to destroy Israel and Taiwan is grounded in the dicta of Mao Zedong and his desire to achieve global hegemony via the destruction of democracies and their alliances, starting with Taiwan but now to include the destruction of Israel.
Will the leadership in Taiwan and the United States seize swiftly the opportunities for creative opposition to the CCP hegemon offered by Israel’s asymmetric strategies and capabilities, developed over decades at great cost?
And, will the CCP and Xi Jinping come to realize that their ceaseless drive to suppress the human spirit has created scores of free-thinking soldiers that could flee in their aircraft to Taiwan, thousands of cities with decades of economic and human rights scandals waiting to be exposed, hundreds of massive digital servers of CCP records waiting to be cyber-stolen, and untold millions of Chinese citizens waiting for the right “spark” to rebel?
In other words, the costs of the CCP’s fatal mistake.
Richard D. Fisher, Jr. is a senior fellow with the International Assessment and Strategy Center.
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