Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plans to travel to Azerbaijan next week amid burgeoning relations between the Jewish state and the predominantly Shi’ite Muslim country in the backdrop of U.S. nuclear talks with Iran.
The official visit comes as Azerbaijan has expressed interest in further strengthening ties with Israel and the United States, in addition to joining the 2020 Abraham Accords, which saw Jerusalem establish peace with four Arab countries during the first term of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration.
Netanyahu will meet with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev on May 8 and visit members of the local Jewish community the next day. He is scheduled to spend Shabbat in Baku.
“Azerbaijan is a leading country in the Muslim world in all that concerns normalizing relations with Israel, even before the Abrahamic States,” George Deek, Israeli ambassador to Azerbaijan, told JNS on Tuesday. He added that Azerbaijan is interested in becoming “part of that forum of moderate countries that is in favor of prosperity and flourishing, and against Islamic extremism.”
“Azerbaijan can lead the expansion of the Abrahamic States Forum to non-Arab Muslim countries, and this is something we fully support,” he stated.
Azerbaijan has recently served as an intermediary between Israel and Turkey, whose strained relationship has been exacerbated by the Jewish state’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip following the Hamas-led terror attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
For Israel, ties with Azerbaijan, which shares a 428-mile border with Iran, a country that is home to tens of millions of Azeris, are of strategic importance as a conduit for intelligence. It also supplies more than a third of the Jewish state’s oil.
At the same time, Azerbaijan is a leading purchaser of Israeli military hardware, which helped Baku in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War against archrival Armenia in 2020.
Two years ago, secular Azerbaijan made history when it became the first Shi’ite country to open an embassy in Israel, despite repeated violence and threats from neighboring Iran.
Last month, Azerbaijan signed an agreement in Jerusalem granting the State Oil Company of the Republic of Azerbaijan a license for gas exploration in Israel.
