Gordon G. Chang
"Israel must halt this expansion, reassess the Haifa arrangement, and align itself once again with the values and interests it claims to share with the United States," Gadeer Kamal-Mreeh, a former member of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, wrote in a recent op-ed. "Anything less is a betrayal of our shared security—and of the American trust we rely on."
In March, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued permission to China's state-owned Shanghai International Port Group (SIPG) to double the capacity of its Bay Port in Haifa. The controversial decision entrenches China in one of Israel's most strategic locations and reflects the continuing ambivalence of countries toward the Chinese Communist Party.
Israeli security professionals in 2015 were alarmed when Israel Ports Co., without adequate interagency review, selected SIPG to run the Haifa port for 25 years.
The threat was obvious. Haifa Bay Port is close to Haifa's airport and is a mere 1.8 kilometers away from the Israeli navy's main base. Haifa, in the northern part of the country, has the Jewish state's largest port.
"Israel's seaports are critical strategic infrastructure," Shaul Chorev, a retired Israeli Navy rear admiral and now a director at the Haifa-based Institute for Maritime Policy and Strategy, told Newsweek. The Haifa Bay Port, he pointed out, "is considered to be amongst the country's most important strategic assets."
"To operate the facility, Shanghai International Port Group will have to connect to all the internet systems of both the harbor and the Ministry of Transportation, exposing them to manipulation, data mining and cyber warfare in the service of Chinese government interests," states the September 2019 report by the University of Haifa-Hudson Institute Consortium on the Eastern Mediterranean, co-chaired by Rear Admiral Chorev. "Given the military and intelligence ties among China, Russia and Iran, the Haifa port arrangements create the risk that China might, under some circumstances, obtain sensitive Israeli naval, merchant shipping and maritime infrastructure information and provide it to Iran."
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