En September 2021, the international branch of the Port of Shanghai opened an automated container terminal in Haifa, Israel’s main port, with an annual capacity to handle one million ships. This investment of around one billion euros guarantees China the operation of this terminal for twenty-five years. The two dynamics of the Abraham Accords and the “Silk Roads” then seem to converge.
The Israeli-Arab normalization, launched in September 2020 by the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, indeed seems destined to extend to Saudi Arabia, which would find in Haifa the natural outlet for its trade with the Mediterranean.
As for the “belt and road initiative” (of silk), driven by Beijing in 2013, it is based in the Middle East on massive investments in ports located in Saudi Arabia, Oman and Egypt, a system whose establishment in Israel provides the western component. Yet it is India that has just supplanted China in this strategic showdown for Israel’s largest port.
The “Indo-Abrahamic Block”
The United States, which allocates approximately $4 billion in military aid to Israel each year, has reacted very badly to China’s establishment in Haifa. They highlighted the risks of espionage in this port where the VIe American fleet calls regularly, while Israel’s main submarine base is nearby.
From January 2022, Washington put pressure so that Chinese companies could not win the tender for the extension of the Tel Aviv metro (it was ultimately the French company Alstom and its Israeli partners who were selected). Six months later, US President Joe Biden, visiting Israel, is holding the first virtual summit with Narendra Modi, Indian Prime Minister, and Mohammad Bin Zayed, President of Israel, alongside Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid. of the United Arab Emirates. This quadripartite format is called in English I2U2because of the initials of the countries concerned, “I” for India and Israel, “U” for the USA and the UAE (United Arab Emirates).
But Indian commentators prefer to speak of a “Indo-Abrahamic block”, aimed at integrating India into the dynamics of the Abraham Accords, itself driven by the strategic rapprochement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. Mohammed Bin Zayed cannot ignore that, despite his close relations with Xi Jinping, a large part of the Emirates’ current trade is carried out with India, whose nationals are two to three times more numerous than the Emiratis themselves in their own country.
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