This fall, Israel's international shipping port in Haifa, completed renovations, and recently it went operational.

Almost all of Israel's international trade comes and goes on the water, and Haifa's is the

busiest of the country's three large ports.

The port in Haifa is also where the U.S. Navy's sixth fleet, based in Naples, Italy,

comes to call when it needs fuel and when it seeks to project power in the eastern Mediterranean.

So the port in Haifa sits at the very center of

Israeli trade and industry, as well as its military and diplomatic relationships with regional

powers and the U.S. Navy. And the company that won the tender to operate the port for the next

25 years is known by its acronym S-I-P-G. S-I-G is the Shanghai International

Port Group, or to put it another way, it is China's state-owned Shanghai International Port

Group. And there are Chinese cranes and Chinese software and Chinese management

who now oversee roughly half of Israel's

freight. To get Israelis more used to working so closely with China, to introduce China in the right

way to the Israeli public, China Radio International, also, of course, a government enterprise,

has dispatched the man who runs the Hebrew desk to mount a charm campaign.

Itzik, that is Chinese Itzik, is China's unofficial representative, and he runs a very popular

and funny, and indeed charming YouTube channel, where he has produced hundreds of internet

videos that Israelis love.

Today on the podcast, we learn about the

port in Haifa, its executives in Shanghai, and the propaganda mission that is dazzling Israeli

YouTube consumers. Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. My guest is

the author Mati Friedman, one of the best English-language storytellers of the pulsing,

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