Technology

Frankly it doesn't matter where your phone is manufactured or where the company's headquarters are. Even a backdoor in your modem is not gonna infect any modern operating system. Sure they can pinpoint your location but they can do that anyway just using cell tower triangulation. If you're concerned about that, just use airplane mode as much as possible.

Use GrapheneOS on a Pixel 8 or later. The reason why it only runs on Pixels is because no other phone manufacturer meets their security standards. Get it second hand if you don't want to support Google. The reason why it should be a Pixel 8 or later is because that's when they added support for hardware memory tagging, making it exponentially more difficult for you to get infected by Pegasus and other spyware. Honestly it's probably the most powerful hardware security feature developed in the past decade.

The only other phone with support for memory tagging is the brand new iPhone 17, nothing else supports it at the moment. Sure I guess this means you could also use an iPhone as long as you enable lockdown mode on it and make sure advanced data protection is enabled on your iCloud account.

A Chinese phone won't protect you against Israeli spyware. It just isn't designed for that from a technical perspective.