Published: 14 January 2022
Last updated: 4 March 2024
MATTI FRIEDMAN: Beijing’s courtship of Israel has been canny and effective
LAST WEEK I drove up to Haifa to see with my own eyes a sight that, for most Israelis, has yet to sink in: the country’s brand new port, our third, which is beautiful, automated, efficient, and operated by the same Chinese company that runs the megaport at Shanghai.
The most prominent face of China in Israel belongs to a guy named Itzik. His real name is Xi Xiaoqi, and he’s a 35-year-old resident of Beijing, but here he’s known as Itzik ha-Sini, or “Chinese Itzik.” He gets recognized on the street. He stars in hundreds of internet videos about life in Israel from a Chinese perspective, and about life in China made accessible for Israelis.
Some of these appear on his own YouTube channel, but sometimes he appears on Israeli outlets like Channel 12 or KAN 11, the public broadcaster, where journalists are delighted to have a Chinese figure—the first—who speaks perfect, slangy Hebrew and has an acute grasp of the Israeli audience. He’s impossible not to like.
I caught Itzik on Zoom from Beijing. He was born in the city of Jiangyin, he said, son of a traffic cop and a real estate agent. He’d never met a Jew or heard a word of Hebrew before arriving at university at age 18. The school offered Japanese, Nepali, Dutch, and a few other languages, but his grandfather told him that Jews were smart - people of the book.
Everyone thinks this in China, he said. If his years communicating with real Jews in Israel has disabused him of this notion, he was too polite to say so. During his Hebrew studies, first in Beijing with an Israeli teacher and then at Tel Aviv University, he adopted his Hebrew name, a diminutive of Yitzhak, or Isaac.
Photo: Xi Xiaoqi, ‘Chinese Itzik,’ joins IDF soldiers in training for an episode on his Hebrew-language YouTube channel (Youtube)
