The flower of Sino-Israeli friendship is blooming

A first of several China dispatches. This one, in Tablet, looks at Sino-Israeli relations, a strange little whale-and-pilot dance.

Kosher Chinese
At this spring’s World Expo 2010 in Shanghai, Israel will show off its burgeoning bilateral relationship with the host country

The beit knesset—the meeting place—is Haya’s Mediterranean Cuisine, an Israeli restaurant in Shanghai’s Zhuanqiao district. Forty-odd Shanghai-based businessmen and women, members of the the Israeli Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, are smoking like Chinese and drinking espresso like natives of Tel Aviv. Chocolates, made by an Israeli living in Luxemburg, in town for China’s first Salon du Chocolat, are said to be on their way. Designer glasses and shaved heads surround the tables.

Jackie Eldan, Israel’s consul general in Shanghai, in a grey suit and looking tired with a five o’clock shadow, is standing in front of a rendering, projected on a wall, of Haim Dotan Architects’ Israel Pavilion for Shanghai’s World Expo 2010, less than 100 days from opening. He is telling the group, a bit mischievously and in English, that the modernist pavilion—it looks a bit like a high-backed snail followed by a slime trail—exceeds the strict height limitations by four meters, making it the second-tallest national building on the grounds.

“Our placement is good,” Eldan says. “Right next to the Chinese Pavilion,” which looks like a massive inverted pyramid, colored in an auspicious shade of red, the color of prosperity. “But we still look like a grain of rice that fell out of that big bowl.”

Read the rest here.