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Israel and Azerbaijan: An odd - but fond - couple
Jpost.com (The Jerusalem Post online edition)
February 19, 2015 Thursday
On the surface it appears the ties of friendship between the Jewish
state and the secular Muslim state can serve as a model for all, but
the two are much more linked on strategic importance, defense.
BAKU - In a crowded classroom inside a distinctly non-impressive
building at the Baku Slavic University - a city dotted with grand,
European-style mansions just down the street from postmodern,
futuristic buildings - a modest ceremony took place January 27,
International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Hundreds of similar programs and ceremonies took part around the globe
on the same day, and this one was far from the largest or the most
impressive.
Moreover, with attempts by some of the organizers of the event to draw
parallels between the genocide of the Jews and the murder of
Azerbaijanis by Armenians in the last century, it surely did not run
according to what Yad Vashem might consider an ideal script. (One sign
at the entrance to the hall had a poster that read "Holocaust and
Khojaly," a reference to the 1992 massacre of hundreds of Azerbaijanis
during the war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh.) But still.
Here, in the middle of Azerbaijan, an Islamic country with a majority
Shi'ite population, a ceremony took place commemorating the murder of
six million Jews.
To put that in proper perspective, consider that in Iran -
Azerbaijan's menacing neighbor to the south - the government denies
the Holocaust and sponsors cartoon contests mocking it.
And consider as well that Turkey, its neighbor to the west and its
closest ally, has a president - Recep Tayyip Erdogan - who has accused
Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians, and likened
Israel's actions to those of the Nazis.
Yet despite its neighbors and their leaders, members of this country's
small but ancient Jewish community - including a Jewish member of the
Azerbaijani parliament - were discussing the Holocaust in a room
filled with Muslim students from the university and members of the
media. And all that under government sponsorship.
Welcome to Azerbaijan.
"One of our greatest achievements," explained Kamal Abdulla,
Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev's adviser on multinational,
multicultural and religious affairs, "is our independence. We are not
dependent on anyone."
Certainly not on Russia, nor the US. And neither on Iran, nor Turkey.
Which explains why a Holocaust memorial ceremony could take place in
Azerbaijan at all.
LIKE ALL lands, Azerbaijan has its paradoxes.
Over-sized photos of Aliyev, and even more so, ever-present pictures
and huge monuments to his father, Heydar Aliyev, festoon the streets
of a country that prides itself in having come out of the shadows of
Soviet rule. Government officials and spokesmen constantly praise the
country's multiculturalism, even though 92 percent of their 9.4
million people are Muslim. And the leader has pumped $180 billion
generated from phenomenal oil income into revitalizing and modernizing
the capital, even as parts of the colorful city have no sidewalks.
But there is no greater Azerbaijani paradox than its close
relationship with the Jewish state - a relationship that is only
getting closer with time.
"The level of trade in 2012-2013 with a country like Azerbaijan is
very impressive," Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman said in January,
at a meeting in Jerusalem with Israel's ambassadors in Euro- Asia. The
$5b. in annual trade with Azerbaijan, he said, is more trade than
Israel does with France.
But few in Israel are aware or know about that - not the trade, nor
Azerbaijan, nor Israel's relationship with it. The vast majority of
that trade is the oil Israel buys via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline
- Jerusalem buys some 40% of its oil from Baku - and most of what
Azerbaijan buys from Israel is in the sphere of weapons technology or
arms. And both those categories of purchases are strategic ones,
generally kept well out of the news.
As Aliyev said a few years ago in a quote captured in a WikiLeaks
cable from the US embassy in Baku: The Israeli-Azerbaijani bilateral
relationship is like an iceberg, nine-tenths of it below the surface.
SAY THE name Azerbaijan to friends, and some will likely mangle it,
calling it instead Azerbastan. Their minds will probably conjure up
images of fighting and Muslims and extremists.
Those with strong geographic awareness might think of the Caspian Sea;
those who have literary tendencies might remember Kurban Said's
classic novel Ali and Nino.
The rest, however, might just confuse the country with the nearby
"stans," mixing it up with Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and
Kyrgyzstan.
"We came here with a bit of skepticism because this is a Muslim state,
and we are surrounded by Muslim states that don't like us," said Acre
Mayor Shimon Lankri during a meeting with government officials at the
end of January in Baku, summing up mainstream Israel's gut impression
of Azerbaijan.
"Most people in Israel don't know much about Azerbaijan.
We were surprised by the depth of the relationship between our two
countries, and also by the development that we see in this city."
Lankri was the head of a small Israeli delegation brought over by the
Azerbaijani government, with one of the purposes being to better
expose Israelis to the country and its ties with Israel.
Lankri, who has some 9,000 Jews of Azerbaijani origin in his city of
60,000 people, is building a community center there for Jews from the
Caucasus, which will also serve as a heritage house for the 70,000
Azerbaijani-born Jews now living in Israel.
And it is those Jews, or rather the Jewish community that spawned
them, which have been one of the key catalysts that have motored the
burgeoning ties between the two states.
SOME TWO hours north of Baku, through barren steppes with the Caucasus
Mountains visible along the horizon, sits the city of Quba, capital of
a region of some 150,000 people.
Across the river from Quba is Krasnaya Sloboda, or Red Town, an
entirely Jewish village of some 4,000 Jews - think of a Central Asian
version of New York's Kiryas Joel, without the hassidim.
David Pessachov, the representative of the Jewish village on the
regional council, praises through a translator his country's treatment
of the Jews, both today and historically.
While anti-Semitism in Europe is on the march, he noted, in Azerbaijan
it doesn't exist, and never has. Even in the days of the Soviets, the
Jews in Quba did not suffer the same degree of repression as their
coreligionists elsewhere in the Soviet Union, he asserted.
To underline his point, Pessachov quoted a comment Aliyev said about
the Mountain Jews, who make up most of the Jews in the village: "Jews
are my friends, Mountain Jews are my brothers."
Asked if he feels safe in Azerbaijan, he said "completely," and
returned the question: "Do you feel safe in Israel?" But safety, it
seems, is not everything: His father lives in Israel, his mother in
New York, and three of his children in Moscow.
To judge by the facilities for Jews in Quba, and in Baku, those Jews
who do leave the country are not doing so because they can't live a
Jewish life in Azerbaijan. On the contrary, the government - and
various Jewish organizations - have gone to great lengths to rebuild
synagogues, build mikvaot, ensure ritual slaughter and make sure that
Jews have the ability to live as Jews in the country, if indeed that's
what they want to do.
One such synagogue is in Quba, where - next to a park with a huge
statue of Heydar Aliyev, Azerbaijan's equivalent of David Ben-Gurion -
stands one of the neighborhood's three synagogues (there were 13 in
this region of the Mountain Jews before the Soviets moved in). The
park is surrounded by mansions, some sitting empty and owned by
oligarchs who live abroad, but want to retain a link to the Jewish
village of their birth.
The Quba region is known for its detailed, tightly woven Persian rugs,
and a number grace the floor of the central synagogue, also artfully
decorated with wood-carved furnishings.
A man stands at the door to the synagogue entrance, instructing those
who enter to take off their shoes; not, as one might suspect, to
protect the rugs, but rather in the tradition of the Mountain Jews,
because God instructed Moses to doff his sandals before approaching
the burning bush. That's one interpretation of the custom. Another:
It's an adaption of the Muslim custom of taking off shoes for prayer.
In a side room, an emissary from Israel is teaching some 40 young
women - aged 14 to 25 - about Jewish history, "from creation to the
present." The girls smile and shake their heads affirmatively when
asked, through a translator, if there is a future for Jews in this
place. They were born there, their parents and parents' parents were
born there, and they have what they need to live Jewish lives.
"Why not?" one woman responds, "all we need are jobs."
KAMAL MAKILI-ALIYEV, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic
Studies, a Baku think tank, attributes the seemingly anomalous ties
between this secular Shi'ite country with the Jewish state in some
part to those girls and their families - the historic Jewish community
of Azerbaijan, a community dating back some 2,500 years that today
numbers some 9,000 people, from a peak of nearly 60,000 in 1926.
"We used to, and still, have close ties with the Jews. Azerbaijan
hosted a very large community in Baku, and in the northern part of the
country. We have always had common links, and the community had its
influence," he said, adding that the Jewish community has had a
significant impact on the society in music, architecture and as
fighters during the world wars, and - more recently - in the Nagorno-
Karabakh conflict.
Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry spokesman Hikmet Hajiyev echoed this
sentiment, saying the "human dimension" should not be underestimated
and has played an "important role" in the development of ties between
the two countries.
But that, obviously, does not tell the whole story.
Iran also has an ancient Jewish community - as did Yemen, Iraq and
Syria - but none of that did much to help ties with Israel. Sentiment
may help grease the relationship between the two countries, but they
are not the building blocks of the relationship; those building blocks
are interests.
IT IS not difficult at all to figure out why Israel is keen on ties
with Azerbaijan. First, all one has to do is look at a map. Sandwiched
between Russia, Turkey, Georgia, Armenia and Iran, and on the oil-rich
Caspian Sea, the country is very strategically located.
"The relations with Azerbaijan are very special," said Israel's
ambassador to the country, Rafael Harpaz, sitting in the Israeli
Embassy in Baku, the target of a planned terrorists attack six years
ago that was foiled thanks to close Israeli-Azerbaijani intelligence
and security cooperation.
"This is a secular, Shi'ite Muslim country," he said, indicating it
could be a model for Israel's relationship with other non-Arab Muslim
countries.
Indeed, ever since Israel's creation in 1948, Jerusalem has sought and
worked hard to develop close ties with non-Arab Muslim states, partly
as a way of diminishing the religious element of the Arab-Israeli
conflict.
Thus, Israel forged close ties - as part of its well-known Periphery
Doctrine in the 1950s - with Iran, until the fall of the shah in 1979;
and with Turkey, until the rise of Erdogan in 2002.
The ties with Azerbaijan - a member of the Organization of the Islamic
Conference - fit well into that pattern, at least the first part of
the equation: the flourishing of ties. And the Azerbaijani government
is taking steps to ensure that the second part of the equation does
not materialize, and that the country does not lose its overwhelmingly
secular nature and became increasingly Islamic - something that
happened in Iran and in Turkey, effectively destroying relations with
Israel.
For instance, to prevent the spread of a radical brand of Islam from
penetrating society - either an extreme brand of Shi'a from Iran, or
an extreme Sunni Wahhabi brand from Saudi Arabia - the government has
mandated that only locally educated clerics can serve as imams in
mosques.
And to prevent its citizens from going abroad to fight for groups like
Islamic State, and then returning to take on the local authorities, it
has enacted a law making it illegal for Azerbaijani citizens to fight
in a foreign army. Anyone who does - and returns to the country - can
be jailed.
A desire by Israel to forge close ties with a secular Muslim state to
serve as a model for others to follow is, indeed, one of Israel's
interests in the country; it is also the interest that diplomats speak
of openly. But it is, obviously, not the only one.
The WikiLeaks cable from January 2009
http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Israel-and-Azerbaijan-391525
Jpost.com (The Jerusalem Post online edition)
February 19, 2015 Thursday
On the surface it appears the ties of friendship between the Jewish
state and the secular Muslim state can serve as a model for all, but
the two are much more linked on strategic importance, defense.
BAKU - In a crowded classroom inside a distinctly non-impressive
building at the Baku Slavic University - a city dotted with grand,
European-style mansions just down the street from postmodern,
futuristic buildings - a modest ceremony took place January 27,
International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Hundreds of similar programs and ceremonies took part around the globe
on the same day, and this one was far from the largest or the most
impressive.
Moreover, with attempts by some of the organizers of the event to draw
parallels between the genocide of the Jews and the murder of
Azerbaijanis by Armenians in the last century, it surely did not run
according to what Yad Vashem might consider an ideal script. (One sign
at the entrance to the hall had a poster that read "Holocaust and
Khojaly," a reference to the 1992 massacre of hundreds of Azerbaijanis
during the war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh.) But still.
Here, in the middle of Azerbaijan, an Islamic country with a majority
Shi'ite population, a ceremony took place commemorating the murder of
six million Jews.
To put that in proper perspective, consider that in Iran -
Azerbaijan's menacing neighbor to the south - the government denies
the Holocaust and sponsors cartoon contests mocking it.
And consider as well that Turkey, its neighbor to the west and its
closest ally, has a president - Recep Tayyip Erdogan - who has accused
Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians, and likened
Israel's actions to those of the Nazis.
Yet despite its neighbors and their leaders, members of this country's
small but ancient Jewish community - including a Jewish member of the
Azerbaijani parliament - were discussing the Holocaust in a room
filled with Muslim students from the university and members of the
media. And all that under government sponsorship.
Welcome to Azerbaijan.
"One of our greatest achievements," explained Kamal Abdulla,
Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev's adviser on multinational,
multicultural and religious affairs, "is our independence. We are not
dependent on anyone."
Certainly not on Russia, nor the US. And neither on Iran, nor Turkey.
Which explains why a Holocaust memorial ceremony could take place in
Azerbaijan at all.
LIKE ALL lands, Azerbaijan has its paradoxes.
Over-sized photos of Aliyev, and even more so, ever-present pictures
and huge monuments to his father, Heydar Aliyev, festoon the streets
of a country that prides itself in having come out of the shadows of
Soviet rule. Government officials and spokesmen constantly praise the
country's multiculturalism, even though 92 percent of their 9.4
million people are Muslim. And the leader has pumped $180 billion
generated from phenomenal oil income into revitalizing and modernizing
the capital, even as parts of the colorful city have no sidewalks.
But there is no greater Azerbaijani paradox than its close
relationship with the Jewish state - a relationship that is only
getting closer with time.
"The level of trade in 2012-2013 with a country like Azerbaijan is
very impressive," Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman said in January,
at a meeting in Jerusalem with Israel's ambassadors in Euro- Asia. The
$5b. in annual trade with Azerbaijan, he said, is more trade than
Israel does with France.
But few in Israel are aware or know about that - not the trade, nor
Azerbaijan, nor Israel's relationship with it. The vast majority of
that trade is the oil Israel buys via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline
- Jerusalem buys some 40% of its oil from Baku - and most of what
Azerbaijan buys from Israel is in the sphere of weapons technology or
arms. And both those categories of purchases are strategic ones,
generally kept well out of the news.
As Aliyev said a few years ago in a quote captured in a WikiLeaks
cable from the US embassy in Baku: The Israeli-Azerbaijani bilateral
relationship is like an iceberg, nine-tenths of it below the surface.
SAY THE name Azerbaijan to friends, and some will likely mangle it,
calling it instead Azerbastan. Their minds will probably conjure up
images of fighting and Muslims and extremists.
Those with strong geographic awareness might think of the Caspian Sea;
those who have literary tendencies might remember Kurban Said's
classic novel Ali and Nino.
The rest, however, might just confuse the country with the nearby
"stans," mixing it up with Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and
Kyrgyzstan.
"We came here with a bit of skepticism because this is a Muslim state,
and we are surrounded by Muslim states that don't like us," said Acre
Mayor Shimon Lankri during a meeting with government officials at the
end of January in Baku, summing up mainstream Israel's gut impression
of Azerbaijan.
"Most people in Israel don't know much about Azerbaijan.
We were surprised by the depth of the relationship between our two
countries, and also by the development that we see in this city."
Lankri was the head of a small Israeli delegation brought over by the
Azerbaijani government, with one of the purposes being to better
expose Israelis to the country and its ties with Israel.
Lankri, who has some 9,000 Jews of Azerbaijani origin in his city of
60,000 people, is building a community center there for Jews from the
Caucasus, which will also serve as a heritage house for the 70,000
Azerbaijani-born Jews now living in Israel.
And it is those Jews, or rather the Jewish community that spawned
them, which have been one of the key catalysts that have motored the
burgeoning ties between the two states.
SOME TWO hours north of Baku, through barren steppes with the Caucasus
Mountains visible along the horizon, sits the city of Quba, capital of
a region of some 150,000 people.
Across the river from Quba is Krasnaya Sloboda, or Red Town, an
entirely Jewish village of some 4,000 Jews - think of a Central Asian
version of New York's Kiryas Joel, without the hassidim.
David Pessachov, the representative of the Jewish village on the
regional council, praises through a translator his country's treatment
of the Jews, both today and historically.
While anti-Semitism in Europe is on the march, he noted, in Azerbaijan
it doesn't exist, and never has. Even in the days of the Soviets, the
Jews in Quba did not suffer the same degree of repression as their
coreligionists elsewhere in the Soviet Union, he asserted.
To underline his point, Pessachov quoted a comment Aliyev said about
the Mountain Jews, who make up most of the Jews in the village: "Jews
are my friends, Mountain Jews are my brothers."
Asked if he feels safe in Azerbaijan, he said "completely," and
returned the question: "Do you feel safe in Israel?" But safety, it
seems, is not everything: His father lives in Israel, his mother in
New York, and three of his children in Moscow.
To judge by the facilities for Jews in Quba, and in Baku, those Jews
who do leave the country are not doing so because they can't live a
Jewish life in Azerbaijan. On the contrary, the government - and
various Jewish organizations - have gone to great lengths to rebuild
synagogues, build mikvaot, ensure ritual slaughter and make sure that
Jews have the ability to live as Jews in the country, if indeed that's
what they want to do.
One such synagogue is in Quba, where - next to a park with a huge
statue of Heydar Aliyev, Azerbaijan's equivalent of David Ben-Gurion -
stands one of the neighborhood's three synagogues (there were 13 in
this region of the Mountain Jews before the Soviets moved in). The
park is surrounded by mansions, some sitting empty and owned by
oligarchs who live abroad, but want to retain a link to the Jewish
village of their birth.
The Quba region is known for its detailed, tightly woven Persian rugs,
and a number grace the floor of the central synagogue, also artfully
decorated with wood-carved furnishings.
A man stands at the door to the synagogue entrance, instructing those
who enter to take off their shoes; not, as one might suspect, to
protect the rugs, but rather in the tradition of the Mountain Jews,
because God instructed Moses to doff his sandals before approaching
the burning bush. That's one interpretation of the custom. Another:
It's an adaption of the Muslim custom of taking off shoes for prayer.
In a side room, an emissary from Israel is teaching some 40 young
women - aged 14 to 25 - about Jewish history, "from creation to the
present." The girls smile and shake their heads affirmatively when
asked, through a translator, if there is a future for Jews in this
place. They were born there, their parents and parents' parents were
born there, and they have what they need to live Jewish lives.
"Why not?" one woman responds, "all we need are jobs."
KAMAL MAKILI-ALIYEV, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic
Studies, a Baku think tank, attributes the seemingly anomalous ties
between this secular Shi'ite country with the Jewish state in some
part to those girls and their families - the historic Jewish community
of Azerbaijan, a community dating back some 2,500 years that today
numbers some 9,000 people, from a peak of nearly 60,000 in 1926.
"We used to, and still, have close ties with the Jews. Azerbaijan
hosted a very large community in Baku, and in the northern part of the
country. We have always had common links, and the community had its
influence," he said, adding that the Jewish community has had a
significant impact on the society in music, architecture and as
fighters during the world wars, and - more recently - in the Nagorno-
Karabakh conflict.
Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry spokesman Hikmet Hajiyev echoed this
sentiment, saying the "human dimension" should not be underestimated
and has played an "important role" in the development of ties between
the two countries.
But that, obviously, does not tell the whole story.
Iran also has an ancient Jewish community - as did Yemen, Iraq and
Syria - but none of that did much to help ties with Israel. Sentiment
may help grease the relationship between the two countries, but they
are not the building blocks of the relationship; those building blocks
are interests.
IT IS not difficult at all to figure out why Israel is keen on ties
with Azerbaijan. First, all one has to do is look at a map. Sandwiched
between Russia, Turkey, Georgia, Armenia and Iran, and on the oil-rich
Caspian Sea, the country is very strategically located.
"The relations with Azerbaijan are very special," said Israel's
ambassador to the country, Rafael Harpaz, sitting in the Israeli
Embassy in Baku, the target of a planned terrorists attack six years
ago that was foiled thanks to close Israeli-Azerbaijani intelligence
and security cooperation.
"This is a secular, Shi'ite Muslim country," he said, indicating it
could be a model for Israel's relationship with other non-Arab Muslim
countries.
Indeed, ever since Israel's creation in 1948, Jerusalem has sought and
worked hard to develop close ties with non-Arab Muslim states, partly
as a way of diminishing the religious element of the Arab-Israeli
conflict.
Thus, Israel forged close ties - as part of its well-known Periphery
Doctrine in the 1950s - with Iran, until the fall of the shah in 1979;
and with Turkey, until the rise of Erdogan in 2002.
The ties with Azerbaijan - a member of the Organization of the Islamic
Conference - fit well into that pattern, at least the first part of
the equation: the flourishing of ties. And the Azerbaijani government
is taking steps to ensure that the second part of the equation does
not materialize, and that the country does not lose its overwhelmingly
secular nature and became increasingly Islamic - something that
happened in Iran and in Turkey, effectively destroying relations with
Israel.
For instance, to prevent the spread of a radical brand of Islam from
penetrating society - either an extreme brand of Shi'a from Iran, or
an extreme Sunni Wahhabi brand from Saudi Arabia - the government has
mandated that only locally educated clerics can serve as imams in
mosques.
And to prevent its citizens from going abroad to fight for groups like
Islamic State, and then returning to take on the local authorities, it
has enacted a law making it illegal for Azerbaijani citizens to fight
in a foreign army. Anyone who does - and returns to the country - can
be jailed.
A desire by Israel to forge close ties with a secular Muslim state to
serve as a model for others to follow is, indeed, one of Israel's
interests in the country; it is also the interest that diplomats speak
of openly. But it is, obviously, not the only one.
The WikiLeaks cable from January 2009
http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Israel-and-Azerbaijan-391525