A Taiwanese pager company was identified last week in connection to Israel’s terrorist attack on Lebanon, in which booby-trapped pagers were detonated, killing at least 32 people and injuring thousands more.

Israeli-Taiwanese relations warmed considerably after Israel launched its genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza last October. Taiwan rushed to condemn the Palestinian operation of 7 October and donated more than half a million dollars to fund services to Israeli soldiers and their families.

The subsequent genocide did not alter Taiwan’s stance, as expressed by its foreign minister, Joseph Wu, in a March meeting with Israeli academics in Taipei: “We condemn the Hamas terrorist attack and stand in solidarity with Israel. Our position hasn’t changed.”

The Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs supported the visit. After Iran’s 13 April retaliation against Israel for the latter’s attacks on its consulate in Damascus, Taiwan quickly moved to condemn Iran. Two days later, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen met with a delegation of Israeli Knesset members led by Boaz Toporovsky, the head of the Israel-Taiwan interparliamentary friendship group, and expressed her country’s solidarity with Israel.

Even though Taiwan was a close friend of all conservative anti-communist Arab regimes, especially Saudi Arabia and Jordan, in 1975, Israel secretly transferred US missile technology to Taiwan and began to sell it Israeli missiles to the tune of half a billion dollars. Indeed, the Israeli defence ministry established a permanent station in Taipei to facilitate military cooperation. Weapons cooperation and sales included artillery guns, mortars, missile boats, rifles, and submachine guns.

  • @[email protected]
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    243 months ago

    It might have something to do with both countries being founded and governed by Fascists. It bears remembering that the KMT colonized the island of Taiwan in much the same way that Israel colonized Palestine; with a swift and brutal round of ethnic cleansing to secure their local hegemony, followed by decades of military support from Fascists in the West.

    I don’t think China should invade Taiwan but it drives me up the wall that so many people think that they are some plucky little democracy standing up to the big, bad, commies, when the reality is that they are just another hyper-capitalist settler-colonial project in the same vein as the US, Israel, Canada, etc.

    • @[email protected]
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      93 months ago

      I don’t think China should invade Taiwan but it drives me up the wall that so many people think that they are some plucky little democracy standing up to the big, bad, commies, when the reality is that they are just another hyper-capitalist settler-colonial project in the same vein as the US, Israel, Canada, etc.

      I agree (including that China shouldn’t invade, which China also thinks), it drives me crazy how people feel fit to say anything at all about Taiwan when they know so little about it that they think “Taiwanese” is the language they speak or that the dominant ethnicity isn’t Han Chinese or that they hadn’t been part of China before US intervention in the Chinese Civil War. These are all things that I’ve encountered in person.

      • @[email protected]
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        3 months ago

        Yeah that’s literally 2 clicks from the basest of searches:

        (Hokien, Hakka, Matsu and Wuqiu are some of very many southern languages of Chinese, and Formosan is the Austronesian group of languages spoken by indingenous population)

  • @[email protected]
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    193 months ago

    US proxies be proxy’ing.

    Never forget the White Terror the ROC subjected the native Taiwanese to — specially leftists and even liberals — when colonizing it.

  • Aradina [She/They]
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    183 months ago

    Because they were both founded by fascists and exist solely to extend american military reach?

  • @[email protected]
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    33 months ago

    As a Taiwanese who moved over seas and is able to see so much more then that backward thinking island provided. This is why is dislike that place with a burning passion

  • @[email protected]
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    13 months ago

    As a Taiwanese who moved over seas and is able to see so much more then what that backward thinking tiny island provided. This is why taiwan need to be part of China and get completely wiped off the face of earth.