Beneath the radar: Taiwan-Israel security between US and China

Taiwan’s deputy foreign minister reportedly slipped into Israel in early December 2025, quietly and without public schedules. Predictably, most attention fixated on the trivia of diplomacy: who he met, what was said, whether there were any photos and whether Israel or Taiwan would confirm anything.

That fixation misses what is actually interesting. Israel has been diplomatically committed to Beijing since 1992 and, in public, treats Taiwan as a non-topic. Yet every few years, a low-profile but politically sensitive Taiwan-Israel interaction resurfaces. The point is not that a breakthrough is underway; it is that a relationship exists that cannot comfortably be acknowledged.

The timing makes this episode even more revealing. After the October 2023 Hamas attack on southern Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza, Taiwan has been siding with Israel and offered strong support. The September 2024 Lebanon pager explosion incident further associated the two together in global headlines. It was reported that alleged Israeli operatives infiltrated the supply chain of Taiwan-branded pagers used by Hezbollah, linked to explosions on 17 September 2024 that killed several key figures and injured thousands, including Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon.

Taiwan’s government and the local manufacturer denied involvement, but Taiwan was still pulled into a Middle Eastern covert-action narrative built from supply chains, plausible deniability and technology with both civilian and security value. In that context, a quiet vice-ministerial trip is not just a curiosity; it is a reminder that security relationships today could, at least in theory, run through firms, systems, components and know-how rather than through traditional “arms deals”.

The best way to understand Taiwan-Israel security ties is to stop imagining them as a stable line and start seeing them as a pressure system. Since 1992, those ties have been forced into a more indirect, deniable and compartmentalised form. Their remaining space is shaped by two external forces pulling in opposite directions.

The US functions as an invisible director: it has enduring security commitments to both Israel and Taiwan, and it effectively sets the perimeter of what Israeli defence-related cooperation is tolerable, with what degree of visibility, and through which channels. China plays the constraint actor: it treats Taiwan as a core national interest, insists on “one China” discipline and uses political red lines plus economic leverage to raise the cost of anything that can be framed as assisting Taiwan’s security posture.

If Taiwan-Israel sensitive ties persist, where do they hide? One hiding place is dual-use technology, where the line between “civilian” and “security” is more legal fiction than engineering reality. Cybersecurity, data analytics, AI-enabled threat detection and electronic-warfare-adjacent tools can be sold as commercial resilience while quietly improving defence readiness.

A second hiding place is the intermediary world: third-country procurement, subcontracting and supply-chain fragmentation that turns a diplomatically obvious transaction into a chain of less obvious steps. A third hiding place is the least visible but often the most consequential: intelligence and cyber cooperation, training, doctrine-sharing and systems integration that never appears in public procurement lists.

Dual-use cooperation is especially attractive because it hides in plain sight. A cyber assessment can become a national security upgrade. A commercial AI model can become an anomaly detector for critical infrastructure or a counter-intrusion analytic tool once it is integrated into broader systems. A “training package” can shift doctrine without any box ever crossing a border.

In this domain, not naming the relationship becomes part of the relationship: the quieter it is, the easier it is to argue it is “commercial”, “technical” or “non-governmental” if exposed. That is not a loophole; it is the operating mode of security competition in a world where software, sensors and supply chains are strategic terrain.

Intermediary mechanisms matter for the same reason: they substitute political visibility with logistical complexity. Taiwan has long sought Israeli expertise in areas such as missile defence, avionics, electronic warfare and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-related development, while relying on intermediaries to reduce diplomatic blowback. Historically, Singapore has often been noted as a potential facilitator, given its military ties with both Israel and Taiwan, which could allow Taiwan to access Israeli expertise without direct government-to-government transactions.

Even when individual claims are hard to verify from the outside, the logic is clear: when politics blocks a straight line, the line bends through third parties.

The US sits at the centre of this geometry because it has repeatedly demonstrated it can veto Israeli defence transfers when they threaten US interests — especially where China is concerned. The Phalcon airborne early warning dispute in 2000 became emblematic of Washington’s willingness to intervene to block sensitive Israeli sales that could strengthen Beijing.

At the same time, Washington’s posture toward Taiwan has historically been more permissive: indirect Israeli cooperation can be tolerated under controlled conditions, especially when it sits in dual-use categories such as cybersecurity, AI, missile defence-related know-how or UAV-linked technologies routed through intermediaries. In other words, the US is not simply a bystander; it is the actor most capable of both tightening and loosening the boundaries of what Israel can do.

China’s role is more direct: shrink the ambiguity and raise the price. Beijing treats foreign security engagement with Taipei — official or covert — as politically illegitimate, and it has learned that economic weight can translate into diplomatic discipline.

China does not need to issue constant threats; it can shape the risk environment through the promise of opportunity and the possibility of interruption. That pressure pushes Israeli actors toward maximum caution and minimum visibility. Over time, it also encourages a specific Israeli habit: downgrade, re-label, split, outsource and de-militarise anything that could be interpreted as “security cooperation” so that — if challenged — it can be defended as ordinary commerce.

Sceptics often respond with a blunt objection: Israel will not offend China over Taiwan; therefore, the security link is exaggerated. But that confuses public posture with private practice. Precisely because Israel is unlikely to make a public pro-Taiwan choice, any residual cooperation is more likely to migrate toward deniable forms.

The question is not whether Jerusalem would openly choose Taipei over Beijing; it is whether there remains space — within US-defined tolerance and beneath China’s political tripwires — for cooperation that improves Taiwan’s resilience without forcing Israel into a public confrontation it does not want.

That is why the December 2025 visit should neither be romanticised as a breakthrough nor dismissed as empty theatre. Its value is diagnostic. It signals that Taiwan still searches for security-relevant expertise beyond its usual channels, that Israel remains a tempting source of such expertise and that both sides still believe there are ways to interact without forcing an open clash with Beijing.

The risk, however, is that grey-zone relationships are prone to “free-lancing”: firms and agencies operate in legal and political fog, and the resulting exposure can be sudden, awkward and costly — exactly the kind of dynamic the pager incident illustrated so vividly.

Taiwan-Israel security ties are not a straight line; they are an undercurrent shaped by American permission and Chinese pressure. Undercurrents do not need to be visible to be real — and in modern security competition, what cannot be photographed can still change the balance.

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