Why Israel Needs to Reconsider Ties with Azerbaijan?
While it is understandable why Israel would want to strengthen its ties with Azerbaijan in the name of realpolitik, what is not clear is why they would want to do so at the expense of human rights.
While much attention has been centered on Israel’s ongoing war effort to root out Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has quietly and deftly engineered a plan that promises to strengthen his country’s ties with Azerbaijan.
In recent weeks, Netanyahu and members of his right-wing coalition have lobbied the Trump administration to extend the Abraham Accords to Azerbaijan in the hopes of establishing “a strong foundation for trilateral collaboration” with the US and Azerbaijan.
Proponents of this idea believe that Azerbaijan can counter the nearby threat of Iran and see its vast pool of natural resources as an alternative to Russian gas. Some have even tried to reframe and position Azerbaijan as a Western-aligned state. But forming any US-Israel-Azerbaijan alliance would be a grave mistake.
For starters, Azerbaijan is not a pro-Western state and does not share the same democratic principles and values with the United States. It is a country led by a petro-dictator, Ilham Aliyev, who has no respect for human rights and has leveraged his country’s oil and gas for transactional diplomacy and various geopolitical trade-offs.
There is a reason why Azerbaijan’s human rights record is constantly under fire: Government crackdowns on political opponents and critics are pervasive, and freedom of the press is nonexistent. Despite what they say or want you to believe, coexistence and tolerance are in short supply. Put simply, Azerbaijan is a country that can’t be trusted.
Nowhere has this been more evident than in Azerbaijan’s aggression toward Armenia, a fledgling democracy in a sea of tyranny. Before granting Azerbaijan a seat at the world’s table, they need to be held accountable for war crimes committed against the Armenian people, including the ethnic cleansing of more than 120,000 Armenians from their ancestral homeland of Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023, which was the biggest displacement of Armenians since the Armenian genocide of 1915.
They also need to release Armenian political prisoners currently being held illegally, including humanitarian Ruben Vardanyan, who was unjustly arrested by the Azerbaijani government when trying to leave Nagorno-Karabakh and has been subjected to a sham trial without any due process.
In an act of defiance, Vardanyan embarked on a hunger strike and, according to recent reports, is in a critical condition with his health rapidly deteriorating. Azerbaijan responded by ordering the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to leave the country, limiting the only access Armenian political prisoners have to the outside world and the ability to report on their condition.
Overlooking these transgressions sends the wrong message to despots and bad actors that they can act with impunity. Instead of extolling Azerbaijan under these false pretenses and turning a blind eye to their malfeasance, the international community should be treating them as a repressive state that in many ways has more in common with Tehran than with Washington.
Divorced from human rights
Advocates for extending the Abraham Accords to Azerbaijan have argued that adherence to human rights has not been a major consideration considering some of the other countries involved in the alliance – United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. While that may be true, it does not make it right. And Israel hasn’t used the Abraham Accords to help partners in the group threaten their neighbors like they have with Azerbaijan.
It is quite remarkable that a country founded in the wake of a genocide would help another country carry one out today. But that is exactly what is happening right now with Israel and Azerbaijan.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks arms sales, Israel supplied Azerbaijan with 70% of its arsenal between 2016 and 2020. Many of these weapons, including long-range missiles and exploding drones, were used by Azerbaijan in recapturing Nagorno-Karabakh and its subsequent forced displacement of all its Armenian inhabitants.
Human rights organizations including Genocide Watch and activists like Luis Moreno Ocampo, who was the first chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, have called Azerbaijan’s actions a genocide and said it was one of the world’s largest refugee and humanitarian crises at that time.
While it is understandable why Israel would want to strengthen its ties with Azerbaijan in the name of realpolitik, what is not clear is why they would want to do so at the expense of human rights and consort with a country that stands against the spirit and true meaning of “never again.”
That is why Israel needs to take another look at its questionable relationship with Azerbaijan, unless it wants to be on the wrong side of history. There are other options for extending the Abraham Accords. Azerbaijan should not be one of them.
The writer is a communications strategist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a first-generation Armenian American and grandson of survivors of the Armenian genocide. Follow him on X/Twitter at @spechdimaldji
