NEW YORK (Press Release) — The deep and multifaceted relationship between Israel and Muslim-majority Azerbaijan is far more than transactional in nature, Azerbaijani Ambassador to the United States Khazar Ibrahim emphasized in his remarks as one of the keynote speakers during the Jerusalem Post Annual Conference on June 5 in New York City.
“It’s not only business. This is how we believe friends should and must act,” Ambassador Ibrahim said in an on-stage interview after estimating that Azerbaijan provides Israel with 50% of its oil and natural gas needs.
Israel-Azerbaijan ties are also growing in the area of cybersecurity, which was a topic of high-level discussions during Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s recent visit to Azerbaijan. In fact, on the same day as the conference in New York, Chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee MK Yuli Edelstein was visiting the Technion Cybersecurity Center in Baku.
“It’s very significant, because I have to be very open — we are learning from the best, and Israel is the best,” Ambassador Ibrahim said. “And in this center, our Israeli friends will help us within three years to train around 1,000 specialists on cybersecurity. Also, one of the goals of this center is to train the trainers, so at some point there will be even more Azerbaijani specialists trained within this Israel-Azerbaijan cooperation.”
Asked about the timing of Azerbaijan’s opening of an embassy in Israel earlier this year, which made it the first Shi’a-majority nation to do so, Ambassador Ibrahim stressed that “in diplomacy, we try to have our strategies more result-oriented than formality-driven.”
“The embassy is there now, but our relations have developed in the last 30 years to be so deep, so broad, and so strategic,” he stated. “Right now, that’s basically the icing on top of the cake. Maybe you can compare it to something related to cuisine…fast food is easy, but I think slow-cooked is much more beneficial.”
Iran-Azerbaijan relations, meanwhile, are currently at their “lowest level” from a historical perspective, according to Ambassador Ibrahim. He noted January’s terrorist attack against Azerbaijan’s embassy in Tehran (in which a member of Baku’s diplomatic corps was killed) as well as March assassination attempt against Azerbaijani Member of Parliament Fazil Mustafa, who is vocally critical of Iran.
“Iran is trying to blame us for many things, but it’s very clear — Israel-Azerbaijan partnerships, strategic partnership, and cooperation are based on our national interests and on our shared values and vision for the future,” Ambassador Ibrahim said. “It’s not intended against any country. If somebody has wrong calculations or ill intentions, it’s not our fault.”
The ambassador conveyed a similar message when asked about Azerbaijan’s 2020 liberation of Karabakh from three decades of Armenian occupation, affirming in regard to Jerusalem’s defense relationship with Baku that “whatever partnership, whatever cooperation we have, is not intended against anybody.”
“Both Azerbaijan and Israel are responsible international actors,” Ambassador Ibrahim said. “We both believe in rules-based international order. And if the United Nations Security Council had four resolutions which demanded withdrawal of illegal military troops of Armenia from Azerbaijan, it means they had to be fulfilled. Azerbaijan implemented these U.N. Security Council resolutions, and whatever partnership, friendship, cooperation we have with our friends, including the great nation of Israel, that’s to our capabilities. But of course, we acted on our own as a responsible member of the international community.”
Ambassador Ibrahim concluded by expressing his pride in the fact that “the Jewish community in Azerbaijan is one of the most ancient in the world” — including the last remaining shtetl, in the Guba region. There, the Red Village is the world’s only all-Jewish village outside of Israel and the U.S.
“Long live friendship between Azerbaijan and the State of Israel,” Ambassador Ibrahim declared.