Author: Emil Lazarian

BAKU—Israel is among Azerbaijan’s top 10 trading partners, with trade between the two countries reaching $1.7 billion last year, according to figures from the Azerbaijani Economy Ministry.

The ever-growing commercial ties come amid burgeoning relations between the Jewish state and the predominantly Shi’ite secular Muslim nation, that have developed from a centuries-long affinity into an unprecedented strategic partnership.

The trade figures for last year, the majority of which come from the oil sector, represent an 85% increase in trade turnover compared to 2021, according to ministry officials.

For Israel, ties with Azerbaijan—which shares a 428-mile border with Iran, a country home to tens of millions of Azerbaijanis—are of strategic importance, both as a conduit for reconnaissance and because it supplies an estimated 30% of the Jewish state’s oil. At the same time, Azerbaijan is a leading purchaser of Israeli military hardware, which helped Baku win its 2020 war with archrival Armenia.

More than 90 Israeli companies are currently operating in Azerbaijan, including in the agriculture and economic industries, with their investment totaling $30 million, according to the ministry.

“Our priority is to promote [trade in] the non-oil sector as part of an economic diversification plan,” said Guntakin Mirzayeva, head of the ministry’s Division of Intergovernmental Commissions and Bilateral Documents, in an interview with JNS.

Azerbaijan is especially interested in Israeli know-how in hi-tech, green energy and agriculture, officials said.  

Rebuilding Karabakh

About a dozen Israeli companies have also expressed interest in undertaking projects in the mountainous Karabakh region, which Azerbaijan won back from Armenia in the war, although agreements are still pending Azerbaijani approval, according to the ministry official.

The vast construction work underway in the region—which requires a special permit to enter—is currently being carried out by Azerbaijan and its historical ally Turkey.

The Azerbaijani government has allocated over $2 billion from the state budget for reconstruction in the area, which is slowly being demined and repopulated after more than three decades of conflict, the ministry official said. Two airports have already been constructed in the region over the last two years, although they are currently not in service. Construction cranes and bulldozers—as well multiple police checkpoints—are omnipresent in the region.

Decades of conflict and lingering tensions

Karabakh and seven surrounding districts, which are a six-hour drive from the capital Baku and snake around the border with Iran and Armenia on still unpaved roads, was the venue of three decades of conflict between the two former Soviet Republics, which have fought two wars since the end of Soviet rule. Three years after the 2020 war ended, a small mountain road that is the only route from Armenia to the territory remains the most immediate flashpoint of the unresolved conflict.

 An Azerbaijani checkpoint on the route, which Baku set up this spring, citing security considerations on its sovereign territory, including the transport of weapons, has impeded food supplies to the region and aggravated still-simmering tensions between the archrivals, drawing international condemnation. Azerbaijan rejects the criticism, and says that the situation at the border is being used as a PR exercise to divert public opinion from what is happening on the road. On-and-off European-, Russian- and American-brokered talks aim to resolve the latest dispute—whose underpinnings are based on the decades of mistrust, bitterness and rivalry.

Demining and rebuilding

In the meantime, Azerbaijani officials are busy at work in the area, removing the estimated one million mines left in the area from the three decades when Armenia held the territory. Only about 20% percent of the mines have been removed to date, with officials estimating that it will take decades to remove them all.

“The biggest obstacle for us is the demining,” said Mirzayeva.

According to Azerbaijani officials, approximately 2,000 landmines are being uncovered per square mile.

Once each area is cleared, building is permitted in the area. While only 1,000 Azerbaijanis are now back in the region—which was once home to hundreds of thousands of people—the government plans to repopulate it with some 140,000 in the next three years, including many whose families once lived there three decades ago, officials said. Tens of thousands of Armenians live in the area as well. In all, about 10 million people live in Azerbaijan.

Cooperation broadening

Israel’s Ambassador to Azerbaijan George Deek told JNS that cooperation between the two countries, once limited to the energy and defense sectors, is vastly broadening to economic and agricultural fields amid the flourishing ties, including what is expected to be the first Israeli desalination plant on the shorelines of the Caspian Sea, near Baku, which would be the second such plant in the country.

“We are certainly very willing and interested to further the presence of Israeli companies in Azerbaijan, and we are in constant dialogue with local officials to advance such cooperation,” said Deek.

https://www.jns.org/world-news/israel-azerbaijani-relations/23/8/7/308259/

09:18 pm | Updated 09:18 pm IST – CHENNAI

“I was only allowed to read the manuscripts after days of persuasion,” said Mr. Bharathan, who was invited to participate in a seminar on Greek Paleography at the headquarters of the Hellenic Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies in Venice.

He sought the help of Margherita Trento, a professor who has studied the history of the literary and social techniques employed by Roman Catholics to localise Christianity in early modern Tamil Nadu. According to her, it could be a copy of the first translation of Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercise in Tamil.

“This translation is most likely by Michele Bertoldi, known in Tamil as Gnanaprakasasamy. This is a prose text from the early 18th Century (likely the 1720s) and has been printed several times in the 19th Century by the Mission Press in Puducherry,” said Ms. Margherita, who has written extensively about the text.

Mr. Bharathan said the library had categorised the manuscripts as ‘Indian Papyrus Lamulic Language–XIII Century’, and the authorities were not aware that it had been written in Tamil. Those in charge of the monastery are of the opinion that the Armenians in Chennai could have brought the manuscripts to Italy.

He has started cataloguing the manuscripts and also has plans to visit Roja Muthiah Library in Chennai since it also has a copy of the work in its possession. “Once I go through the manuscripts and make comparisons, I can get a clear picture,” he added.

https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/tamil-manuscripts-from-18th-century-found-in-armenian-monastery-in-northern-italy/article67162471.ece

When the Soviet Union suddenly dissolved in 1991, the West responded by unanimously extending full and immediate diplomatic recognition to the 15 republics that had emerged from the ruins of the vanished empire. 

That included Israel, as one country on the Western side of the transition, and Azerbaijan as one of the new republics on the opposite side. Jerusalem recognised the Caucasian republic on Christmas Day, 1991. However, unlike the rest of the West, whose concerns at that time focused mainly on remaking the international system’s broader arrangements, Israel was particularly focused on retrieving the Jews of the former Eastern Bloc. 

Part of those efforts included the creation of a route for direct flights between Baku and Tel Aviv. This actually happened a full half-a-year before Azerbaijan’s formal independence, through a deal between its Soviet-era government and the Jewish state. 

It was the beginning of an improbable and elaborate relationship that, 32 years on, constitutes Israel’s strongest alliance anywhere across the Muslim world. 

Baku’s role ended up being relatively marginal to the process of bringing nearly 1 million former Soviet Jews to Israel between 1989 and 2004 – most boarded direct flights from Russia and Ukraine. 

Yet the Baku-Tel Aviv flights laid the foundations for a commercial arrangement that was begging to happen: Israel had no oil, and Azerbaijan had vast petroleum fields in the Caspian Sea, and along its shores. Moreover, the distance between the two countries is short, about the distance between Melbourne and Brisbane. Israel’s previous Middle Eastern oil supply had come from Iran, but this had ended abruptly in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution, forcing Israel to seek energy from distant, and thus costly, alternative suppliers, such as Mexico and Venezuela. 

During the Cold War, Azerbaijani supply and Israeli demand could not meet – but the new world order post-1991 made their encounter possible, not only because capitalism had suddenly become the international consensus, but because Azerbaijan sorely needed cash. Azerbaijani oil thus began reaching Israel, and Baku has been a steady, major supplier of Israeli energy ever since. 

Israel does not publish figures concerning its oil imports, but experts believe Azerbaijan is its largest supplier, averaging around 40% of the Jewish state’s crude imports annually. Traffic on this axis has been so lively that, in 2006, Israel’s then-infrastructure minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer attended the inauguration of the Azeri-Georgian-Turkish pipeline which has since brought Azerbaijani petroleum to fuel millions of Israel cars. 

The energy relationship paved the way for commercial traffic in the opposite direction. Israeli firms built Azerbaijan’s telephone system and Israeli consultants were hired to upgrade Azeribaijani agriculture. 

However, the main traffic would be in the military sphere. 

It was this aspect of the relationship that was most on show when Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant made a very high-profile visit to Baku on July 13-14, meeting President Ilham Aliyev, Defence Minister Zakir Hasanov and other senior defence officials. The defence and security relationship between Baku and Jerusalem is already long, broad and deep, and looks set to get even more intensive and extensive, reflecting both countries’ growing concerns about the behaviour of Azerbijan’s neighbour, Iran, and its proxies.

In 1991, compelled to build an army, an air force and a navy pretty much from scratch, Azerbaijan sorely needed both hardware and know-how – which Israel happily offered. Preliminary deals were struck quickly, and multi-billion-dollar purchases of Israeli defence products followed over subsequent years.

Israeli arms deals are not officially reported, but one particularly sizeable deal with Azerbaijan – US$1.6 billion (A$2.35b) worth of drones, missile interceptors and anti-missile systems – was confirmed by Israeli officials in 2012 in response to an Associated Press report. 

Another deal, whereby Israel Shipyards built 14 coastguard and assault vessels for Azerbaijan’s navy over the past decade, was reported by the website Israel Defense this July. 

In 2016, while hosting Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Baku, President Ilham Aliyev said publicly that his country had signed US$5 billion (A$7.35b) worth of arms deals with Israel. The deals reportedly range from submachine guns and artillery barrels to radars and avionics.  

In early 2022, during a visit to Baku, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen confirmed reports that Israel Air Industries will supply Azerbaijan with two satellites. The deal is reportedly worth US$120 million (A$176.53m). 

Some of this vibrant activity involves the presence of Israeli experts in Azerbaijan, most notably on the naval vessels which were built in Azerbaijan under Israeli supervision. 

Overall, these deals reflect a unique geographic position and strategic predicament that both sets Azerbaijan apart from other post-Soviet republics, and drives its special relations with Israel. 

Straddling a 700-kilometre coastline along the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan is wedged between Russia and Iran, two historic powers which have, over the centuries, taken turns dominating the multi-ethnic Caucasus region, where Azeris are the single largest nationality. Suspicion of both Moscow and Teheran is therefore both a foundation of the Azeri worldview and a pillar of Baku’s foreign policy. 

Moscow’s shadow thickened in 2008, when the Russian army attacked Azerbaijan’s northwestern neighbor Georgia and occupied about a fifth of its land – land which it holds to this day. 

The Iranian threat stems from a mixture of ideological and ethnic differences. Most Azeris are Shi’ite Muslims, but they are generally secular and see their Shi’ite neighbour’s fundamentalism as a menace. 

While they have a common religious history, the two societies are racially unrelated – Iranians are primarily Persian while Azeris are a Turkic people. Azerbaijan’s secularist and Western outlook was made plain following its independence, when it chose to adopt the Latin script rather than the Persian-Arabic or Cyrillic alternatives. 

Moreover, an estimated one-quarter of Iranians are ethnic Azeris, constituting the country’s largest minority, and most are concentrated in northern Iran, and are thus contiguous with Azerbaijan. Although Iranian Azeris have never actively challenged the regime, the ayatollahs fear some kind of a future link-up between the two. 

A statement last November by Azerbaijan’s President concerning the Azeri minority in Iran, asserting that “their security, their rights and well-being are of the utmost importance to us,” and vowing “we will continue to do everything to help the Azerbaijanis who have found themselves cut off from our state,” only exacerbated Iranian fears. 

Iran is also suspicious of Azerbaijan due to its alliance with Turkey, which is ethnically and linguistically close to the Azeris, and has backed Azerbaijan throughout its ongoing three-decade conflict with Armenia. The prospect of a Turkic belt stretching from Istanbul to Central Asia is a major nightmare for Iran.

This, in brief, is the context in which Iran has taken sides against Azerbaijan in its ongoing territorial and ethnic conflict with its neighbour to the west, Armenia. Last year, responding to a Turkish-Azeri plan to establish a transport corridor that would bypass Armenian checkpoints, Iran opened a consulate in the southern Armenian town of Kapan, sparking Azeri protests. 

From Israel’s point of view, the Iranian aspect of Azerbaijan’s situation has turned a vibrant trade partnership into a major strategic asset. 

Azerbaijan has reportedly allowed Israel to use its territory for clandestine activity inside Iran, and potentially to use its airbases in case of a military confrontation between the Jewish state and Iran. Considering that Teheran is more than 1,500 kilometres away from Tel Aviv, Azerbaijan’s proximity to Iran would be invaluable in the event of a military clash between Israel and Iran. 

Over the years, the Azeris have become increasingly open about their special relationship with Israel – so much so that this past March, Baku opened an embassy in Tel Aviv, something it had previously avoided out of fear of a hostile response from parts of the Muslim world, most importantly, Iran. An Iranian rebuke of Baku indeed resulted, but Azerbaijan’s Government didn’t care. 

The relationship is a success story in many ways, yet Israel’s ties with Azerbaijan carry a price tag, and it’s hefty. 

First, the authoritarian government in Baku has been accused of broad human rights violations repeatedly over recent years. One Israeli critic, blogger Alexander Lapshin, was arrested in 2016 in Belarus, at Azerbaijan’s request, after writing critically about the regime following a visit to Azerbaijan. Lapshin was indeed extradited back to Azerbaijan, sentenced and jailed before receiving a presidential pardon the following year. 

Secondly, the alliance with Baku comes at the expense of Israel’s relationship with Armenia, especially after Israeli-supplied drones played a role in fighting last year that ended with an Armenian defeat. 

Israel has stopped short of taking a diplomatic side in the Azerbaijan-Armenia territorial dispute, but the deployment of Israeli hardware against Armenian troops has angered Armenians. Then again, as Iranian allies, the Armenians recognise that they are flying in the face of Israel’s interests, just as Israel’s relationship with Baku is negatively affecting Armenia’s interests. 

It’s been this way for centuries in the Caucasus, where myriad tribes and nations wrestled and traded with each other, while exploiting the rivalries of the surrounding powers to manoeuvre against their local enemies. For better and worse, Israel has found itself part of that long-standing Caucasian struggle. 

https://aijac.org.au/australia-israel-review/baku-to-the-future/?fbclid=IwAR0bPEHnk6ZQ2CZtzG-CGdPJYStm9UAhu74uIyz688H3y5W8teum9pBSxTU