Last week, a joint venture between an Indian and an Israeli company won a bid for the rights to manage Haifa’s seaport. The nearby container port, by contrast, will still be managed by a China-based firm. Yet the new deal may suggest a move away from large-scale Chinese economic entanglement in the Jewish state, which has been a matter of concern for the U.S. for some time—not without reason. Sarah Zheng and Coco Liu report on other evidence that something has changed:

Before 2018, China had been positioning itself as an important international partner for the Israeli tech industry, which sought capital and access to one of the world’s biggest markets. Chinese investors were far from its most vital sources of capital—they invested $424 million in Israeli startups in 2018, about 5 precent of the total investment into the sector—but their connections to Israel were deepening.

In retrospect, that may have been the high-water mark. Last year, Chinese capital accounted for only 1 precent of investment in Israeli startups, data from the IVC Research Center show. This could be a strategic disadvantage for Beijing, which has been grappling with growing hostility from the West.

Companies in Israel that once welcomed Chinese financiers, particularly in sensitive deep-tech sectors, are now hesitant to do business with them because of the potential political consequences in other markets. Under pressure from its U.S. and European backers, one supplier of electric-vehicle components this year abandoned plans to take Chinese capital in exchange for access to the world’s biggest EV market, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

In part, Israeli startups may be getting pickier because they find it easier to attract investors than they have in the past, says Ehud Levy, a general partner at Canaan Partners Israel and also a partner at China’s Lenovo Capital. And even if it hasn’t yet succeeded in getting Israel to adopt its entire policy agenda, the U.S. has convinced many Israeli entrepreneurs of the need to choose sides.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.