2024.06.18
Grandview Institution 2024.06.18 11:12 Beijing
On June 18, 2024, a delegation from the Society for the Promotion of Sino-Israeli Academic Exchanges (SIGNAL, an Israeli think tank) led by its President and Founder Carice Witte, visited GVI, where they had in-depth discussions with their Chinese counterparts on Sino-Israeli relations, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and Israeli-Iranian relations, etc.
The Israeli experts emphasized that the friendship between the Chinese and the Jewish peoples dates back to a long time ago and that China had provided shelter for Jewish refugees from Europe during World War II. Israel seeks to pursue an independent foreign policy, as exemplified by the fact that Israel was the first in the Middle East to recognize the People's Republic of China in 1950. In recent years, Sino-Israeli relations have been negatively affected by external factors such as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the strategic rivalry between China and the United States. However, the two sides should not stop cooperating because of these negative impacts. China is one of Israel's largest trading partners and at the same time the only major country that can maintain friendly relations with all countries in the Middle East. Israel highly values China's status and role in the international community. Unwilling to choose sides between China and the US, Israel hopes to continue friendly ties with China. It would appreciate China's diplomatic mediation in Israel's relations with its neighboring countries to avoid further spillover of the effects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The Israeli delegation was composed of Carice Witte, President and Founder of SIGNAL; Nitzan Horowitz, Chairman of the Meretz Party; Galit Palzur, economist; Yuval Shershevsky, former member of the Mossad; Ori Goldberg, Senior Researcher and Academic Director of SIGNAL; Ohad Neipris, former Deputy Director of the Spokesperson's Department at the Ministry of Finance; Leo Makukh, former Director of Supervision and Foreign Relations at the Ministry of Economy; and Ben Hoffman, former Director of International Affairs for Economics and National Security at the Ministry of Finance.
The GVI’s scholars present at the meeting included Liu Ping, Director of the Center for Defense and Security Studies; Zhu Junwei, Director of the Center for American Studies; Mao Jing, Director of the Department of International Cooperation; Han Hongyu, Deputy Director of the Department of External Cooperation; and Yang Xiaotong, Research Director of the Department of International Cooperation.