Israel’s great power playbook is tempting Taiwan’s leaders

Taiwan’s increasingly open — and discreet — alignment with Israel this year signals a bolder shift in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)’s defence thinking, one that leans toward a more assertive posture. 

On 28 October, Lai Ching-te explicitly invoked Israel as a model, stating that “the Taiwanese people often look to the example of the Jewish people when facing challenges to our international standing and threats to our sovereignty from China”, and praising Israel’s “determination and capacity to defend its territory” as embodying the “spirit of David against Goliath”. Strikingly, Lai’s rhetoric mirrors Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s biblical framing — drawn from the same Book of Samuel — in which Hamas is likened to Amalek. 

Transposed into an East Asian context, Lai casts Taiwan as “David” and mainland China as “Goliath”. Why does Taiwan’s DPP leadership seek symbolic identification with Netanyahu’s genocidal rhetoric on Gaza while framing China as an existential, quasi-civilisational enemy? To understand this analogy — and Taiwan-Israel engagement more broadly, including emerging security cooperation — one must first grasp Israel’s security strategy and its longstanding practice of embedding local conflicts within great power rivalry, a logic Taiwan now appears eager to emulate.

Israel’s security strategy has never rested on overwhelming power alone. Across the 20th century — and drawing on much older political experience — Jewish political actors, and later the Israeli state, repeatedly advanced their interests by embedding local objectives within great power rivalry. 

The pattern is consistent: when empires or major powers collide, space opens for strategically positioned actors to convert vulnerability into leverage. It is a story of positional intelligence — the ability of a capable but constrained actor to embed its security agenda within wider rivalries so that others shoulder the highest costs of confrontation while Israel reaps the strategic benefits.

This instinct did not originate in the 20th century. Long before statehood, Jewish communities in the Middle East survived by embedding themselves in imperial weak points. Under the Muslim Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258), Jewish communities effectively leveraged shared Abrahamic traditions and linked institutions such as the Exilarchate and Rabbinic academies to imperial authority, local governance and transregional commerce, exploiting fiscal and administrative fragilities. 

During the Crusader era, Jewish physicians, financiers and intermediaries — such as court doctors serving rulers like Saladin and merchants documented in the Cairo Geniza — operated across Muslim and Christian polities in ways that few other groups could. These actors were not powerful, but their ability to move between rival authorities — linguistically, commercially and institutionally — made them indispensable precisely when relations between Muslim and Christian powers were weakest.

What was once intermediation through communal institutions evolved into influence exercised through modern alliance and policy-making ecosystems. In the contemporary era, the same structural logic operates through different instruments. 

Rather than intermediating solely as minority communities, Jewish political actors and organisations have increasingly operated through lobbying networks, military institutions and policy advocacy across Europe and the US. The underlying strategy, however, remains consistent: positioning oneself at critical junctions of larger power systems, where shaping how others define their interests can be as consequential as the use of force itself.

The modern pattern emerged during World War I. As Great Britain and the Ottoman empire clashed, Zionist leaders recognised that imperial war created a rare opening to internationalise their political project. By aligning Jewish aspirations with British wartime interests — weakening Ottoman control and securing imperial routes — they embedded a local cause within a global conflict. The result was the 1917 Balfour Declaration, achieved not through battlefield victory but through strategic alignment amid imperial collapse.

World War II reinforced this logic. Jewish militias in Mandatory Palestine operated within the British-German war, a conflict that transformed the political and military environment. While constrained by British rule, Jewish leaders leveraged the existential struggle against Nazism to build military capacity, organisational experience and international legitimacy. The Jewish Brigade fought under British command, while underground organisations expanded under wartime conditions.

When the war ended, the balance of capability had shifted decisively. Jewish militia-converted terrorist organisations, including the Haganah and Palmach as well as the Irgun and Lehi, redirected their wartime experience toward an escalating armed campaign against British rule in Mandatory Palestine, helping to render continued British governance politically and militarily unsustainable and ultimately prompting Britain’s withdrawal.

The Cold War offered a new and durable structural opening. As US-Soviet rivalry intensified in the Middle East, Israel learned to frame its regional conflicts through the prism of superpower competition between East and West. Israel increasingly portrayed its Arab adversaries as Eastern-aligned clients of Moscow, while presenting itself as a reliable Western outpost in a strategically vital region.

This framing proved effective. American military, diplomatic and economic support expanded as Israel became embedded within US containment and credibility calculations, formalised in arrangements such as the 1981 US-Israel Strategic Cooperation Agreement. Israel learned how to operate inside a bipolar system where alignment and escalation mattered as much as territory, converting the US policies to Israel’s interests.

This logic extended into agenda-setting. Israel’s 1981 strike on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor was unilateral, but its strategic afterlife mattered more than the raid itself. Over the following decades, Israeli intelligence assessments and threat narratives about Iraqi weapons programs circulated widely in Washington and strategically allured the US into the invasion of Iraq. 

By the time the US invaded Iraq in 2003, Israel was not a combatant — but its longstanding depiction of Iraq as an intolerable strategic threat aligned behind and closely with US post-9/11 perceptions.

The end of bipolarity weakened Israel’s traditional ideological anchoring in the West and encouraged a search for new narratives. Even before Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations, Bernard Lewis’s 1990 essay “The Roots of Muslim Rage” offered a framework that recast geopolitical conflict in civilisational terms. 

After 9/11, Israel forcefully reframed its conflicts with Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran as integral fronts in a broader Western war against transnational extremism. This reframing did more than align Israeli security concerns with Western counterterrorism agendas; it elevated them, helping to mobilise diplomatic protection and sanctions regimes, and intensified intelligence cooperation and supportive regional military postures broadly favourable to — and benefiting — Israel.

Iran illustrates the pattern most clearly. For more than two decades, Israel has worked to internationalise and demonise the Iranian nuclear issue, encouraging sanctions, isolation covert action and sustained military contingency planning, while itself possessing weapons of mass destruction. While Israel has sparked conflict with Iran through covert operations or limited strikes, the heaviest and dirtiest work — as well as the political, economic and military costs of confrontation — have been borne by the US and its allies.

That adjustment is now visible in East Asia. The emerging order is no longer unipolar but increasingly bifurcated, defined by US-China rivalry and mutual risk aversion. In this largely Confucian cultural and political landscape, Israel’s rhetoric and strategic positioning cannot be interpreted — or justified — through the Judeo-Christian narratives that once anchored its role in the West. Appeals to Abrahamic tradition, shared historical memory, or democratic affinity — so central to Israel’s rhetoric and relationship with Europe and the US — carry far less explanatory or mobilising power in the Indo-Pacific. 

As Washington seeks to avoid direct war with China while encouraging — and even rearming — partners along China’s periphery, Israel perceives both risk and opportunity. It has adjusted by positioning itself as a strategic intermediary — a remote enabler rather than a frontline actor. 

Reported Israel-Taiwan cooperation in arms sales, layered defence concepts, resilience planning and civil defence integration positions Israel as a forerunner of a new US approach — one that avoids direct great power confrontation with China while turning Taiwan into a “hedgehog” through arms sales and allied capacity building. These calibrated engagements — carried out not by the US itself but by US partners from afar — transfer high-end military know-how to Taiwan while reducing the risk of irreversible escalation with Beijing.

Two structural factors, among others, help explain why Taiwan’s attempt to emulate Israel’s security relationship with the US. First, both Israel and Taiwan are small polities confronting much larger adversaries. Second, the US-Israel alliance developed in a context where American support did not risk systemic war with a peer competitor. Taiwan, by contrast, fears that the US may not fight on its behalf directly, but instead limit its role to indirect armament and assistance.

Israel’s relationships with major powers have never been driven solely by the need for territorial survival; they have also served to advance Israel’s own strategic role within great power competition. From Britain in the early 20th century to the US today — and even episodically toward China and Russia — Israel has sought to leverage rivalries among larger powers for strategic and economic gain, as illustrated by its aborted 1990s early warning aircraft deal with China. This capacity to manoeuvre reflects Israel’s status as a small but autonomous strategic actor rather than a mere client state.

Lai’s invocation of the Israel analogy appears less an analytical comparison than a political device. It serves to embolden domestic confidence by suggesting that Taiwan, like Israel, could defend itself if US and allied military aid were sufficiently expanded — an assumption that is largely unrealistic given the cross-strait balance. At the same time, the analogy functions as a signalling strategy, attempting to elevate Taiwan’s strategic value in Washington by borrowing from Israel’s moral framing and lobbying networks, despite the profound structural differences between the two cases.

From World War I and World War II to Cold War bipolarity, post-Cold War civilisational framing, and today’s bipolar competition, the pattern has been consistent: Israel’s statecraft has relied on positional intelligence — knowing where power structures strain and how to operate there without paying the full price. 

That price has instead fallen on empires and societies — from the British empire and the Palestinians to the US and the Iranians. If this logic now migrates to East Asia, the bill may once again be paid not in Jerusalem, but in Washington, Beijing — or Taipei.

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