Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu speaks with US President Donald Trump at Ben Gurion International Airport on May 23, 2017 in Jerusalem, Israel. Kobi Gideon | GPO | Getty Images

"Make new friends, but keep the old; Those are silver, these are gold." That's the line about friendship that some of us were taught as kids. It may also hold true for foreign policy, at least that's what some top bureaucrats in Israel are hoping to prove. In this case, Israel's "golden old friend" is the U.S. and its "silver new friend" is China. Now, Israel is increasingly being asked to choose one over the other. The Trump administration has made repeated warnings to Israel over the past year and a half that the Jewish state must distance itself and even cancel a number of economic deals it's made with Beijing.

The two biggest warnings came in January, when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that unless Israel reduces cooperation with China, the U.S. might reduce "intelligence sharing and co-location of security facilities." Earlier in the year, U.S. national security advisor John Bolton encouraged Israeli officials to take a tougher stance against Chinese electronics manufacturers ZTE and Huawei. Not only is the U.S. clearly Israel's most important and strongest ally, but it should be noted that Pompeo and Bolton are also two of Israel's strongest supporters in Washington. So what makes this a tough decision for Israel? First, you have to consider the nation's culture of survival. In a country filled with Holocaust survivors and their children, most of the population is brought up learning that all the great relationships between Jews and non-Jewish nations in the past have eventually gone sour. While the U.S.-Israeli relationship is special, it's a time-tested conviction for the country to avoid putting all of its allegiance eggs in one basket. Israel has done just that since it first became a state in 1948. It would probably surprise many people who think the U.S. has always been Israel's No. 1 defense source to learn that France was Israel's top foreign source for arms for most of its first 20 years of existence. In more recent years, Israel has vastly deepened and improved its relationship with once hostile countries like India, Russia and – most importantly – Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman. But the Chinese issue seems to have convinced at least Israel's diplomatic corps that it's time to rethink that philosophy. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's own Foreign Ministry has issued a widely reported assessment to the security cabinet that Israel will probably not be able to enjoy the fruits of Chinese infrastructure investments without losing a significant degree of American support. Netanyahu didn't sit on that report, he immediately postponed a vote on a new monitoring plan for Chinese investments in Israel in order to beef up its restrictions on the high-tech projects that make the Trump administration the most uneasy.

Major infrastructure projects at risk