In recent years, Azerbaijan has become Israel’s closest partner among predominantly Muslim countries. While the Republic of Azerbaijan officially separates religion from state, it would be naive to believe the Islamic factor plays no role in relations between Baku and Jerusalem. Nevertheless, for decades, relations between the two countries have remained stable and essentially crisis-free.
This stability relates directly to the significant status held by Azerbaijan’s Jewish communities. The author can confirm this conclusion based on his visits in fall 2022 and early June 2025 while working with the Jewish Agency (JAFI). During these trips, the author visited the Mountain (Caucasian) and Ashkenazi Jewish communities of Baku, as well as Quba (Guba)—one of the most important centers of traditional Mountain Jewish settlement—and Privolnoye, a village home to Russian-speaking Gers and Subbotnik Karaites.
It is well known that Azerbaijan and Israel have closely cooperated for decades not only in trade but also in the field of security. In recent years, Azerbaijan has become Israel’s closest partner among all countries where the majority of the population traditionally practices Islam: according to official data, 96% of Azerbaijan’s population adheres to this religion.
According to estimates, about three-quarters of them are Shiites, which at least nominally includes the overwhelming majority of ethnic Azerbaijanis as well as the Iranian-speaking Talysh and Tats. The rest are Sunnis, typically identifying as Lezgins and members of other Dagestani ethnic groups living in the country (Avars, Akhvaks, Budughs, Khinalugs, Kryz, Tsakhurs), as well as Meskhetian Turks and Kurds. At the same time, the author has never heard of any friction between followers of these two branches of Islam in Azerbaijan. In other words, the dividing lines tend to run more along ethnolinguistic rather than strictly confessional lines.
That said, it would not be entirely accurate to describe Azerbaijan as a Muslim state, since, according to the constitution, the Republic of Azerbaijan is a secular state where religion is separated from government. Yet, despite the deliberately limited role of Islam in Azerbaijani politics, it would be naïve to assume that the Islamic factor plays no role at all in relations between the two countries—if only in the form of pressure from Azerbaijan’s partners within the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. It is enough to recall that Azerbaijan opened its embassy in Tel Aviv only in 2023, thirty years after Israel had opened its embassy in Baku.
Nevertheless, for decades the relationship between the two countries has remained stable and crisis-free, with the exception of the 2017 minor incident involving the arrest of Israeli blogger Alexander Lapshin by the Azerbaijani authorities. However, this arrest was in no way connected to the Arab-Israeli conflict; rather, it was caused by the fact that Lapshin, who also held Russian citizenship, visited the unrecognized Republic of Artsakh and bragged about it in his blog. Moreover, in a certain sense, Israelis enjoy an advantage over citizens of most other countries when entering Azerbaijan: in 2010, President Ilham Aliyev signed a decree prohibiting the automatic issuance of visas to foreigners upon arrival at Azerbaijani airports, requiring them instead to obtain visas in advance from Azerbaijani consulates. The only exceptions were made for citizens of Turkey and Israel.
There is another important indicator. Given the overwhelming majority of “ethnic Muslims” in Azerbaijan’s population, one might theoretically expect peace and cooperation to exist at the governmental level but not necessarily between the peoples—similar to the situation with Jordan and Egypt, which have long maintained diplomatic relations with Israel. However, in Azerbaijan the situation is fundamentally different from that of these two Arab countries. It can be compared instead to the attitude toward Israelis in Turkey before the rise to power of the Islamist Justice and Development Party, led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in the early 2000s.
The author twice visited Azerbaijan within the framework of his work with the Jewish Agency (Sokhnut): first in the autumn of 2022, immediately after the announcement of mobilization in the Russian Federation, and then in early June 2025. In addition to Baku, he visited the regional center of Quba (Guba) in northeastern Azerbaijan and the village of Privolnoye in Jalilabad District in the southeast. In Israel, these localities—if known at all—are recognized primarily in a distinctly Jewish context: Quba as one of the most important traditional centers of Mountain Jewish settlement, and Privolnoye as a village of Russian-speaking Gerim and Karaite Subbotniks, which was also home to Mountain Jewish families. In reality, however, the situation is rather different.
According to the 2020 census, the city of Quba itself had a population of 25,300, of whom 85.5% were Azerbaijanis, 10.2% Lezgins, and 3.1% Russians. The Jewish population is concentrated in the settlement of Krasnaya Sloboda (Qırmızı qəsəbə), administratively subordinate to Quba and separated from the town proper by the narrow Kudyalchay River. The number of inhabitants of Krasnaya Sloboda (almost exclusively Mountain Jews) is estimated at 3,500. Thus, Jews constitute a visible but by no means defining ethnic element in Quba. As for Privolnoye, the Jewish population left the village almost entirely in the 1990s, with most moving to Russia, a smaller number repatriating to Israel, and some relocating to the Baku metropolitan area. According to the 2009 census, Privolnoye had 4,484 residents, almost exclusively Azerbaijanis. Only a few dozen Gerim and Subbotniks remained. The village’s history is now recalled mainly by a large cemetery with inscriptions in Hebrew and Russian.
Thus, the author had the opportunity to interact with Azerbaijanis not only in the capital but also in the aforementioned provincial localities. In doing so, he never once encountered any expressions of hostility toward him as a Jew or an Israeli. On the contrary, many Azerbaijanis expressed sympathy for Israelis and for the State of Israel, emphasizing the importance of Azerbaijan’s cooperation with the Jewish state in achieving victory in the Second Karabakh War of 2020. As a result of that war, most of the territory previously controlled by the army of the Republic of Artsakh came under the control of the Azerbaijani army, while the territory that remained under the control of the unrecognized state was blockaded by Azerbaijani forces.
When speaking of the friendliness of the people of Azerbaijan, it should be noted that the author interacted not only with acquaintances and Azerbaijanis connected to him through work, but also with entirely random individuals. It is worth emphasizing that the language of the streets in Azerbaijan today is, by default, Azerbaijani—including in Baku, which until the late 1980s had been a multiethnic metropolis where Russian served as the lingua franca. Many Azerbaijanis of the middle and younger generations no longer speak Russian at all. The author knows a few dozen phrases in Turkish, which he had to use in cases where his interlocutors did not understand Russian at all. One way or another, there was never any doubt that he was not a local, and when asked where he was from, the author always replied that he was from Israel. The only exception came in the days following the start of the IDF’s operation against Iran, when all Israelis abroad—particularly in Azerbaijan, which directly borders Iran—were advised to “keep a low profile.”
The transition of the Iranian-Israeli confrontation into an open, full-scale conflict caught the author in Baku, which undoubtedly sharpened his observations during his second visit. On June 13, 2025, with the start of Operation “The People as a Lion”, the situation changed abruptly. Notably, armed security forces immediately appeared at Baku’s synagogues, something that had not been observed before. However, this and other security measures introduced at the time were not related to any displays of hostility toward Israelis or Jews on the part of the local population, but rather to fears that Iranian agents might carry out terrorist attacks against them on Azerbaijani soil. Such a scenario seemed highly plausible, especially considering that Azerbaijani security services had thwarted an attempted terrorist attack by Iranian agents against the Israeli embassy in Baku in November 2023.
The author had occasion to meet Iranians in Baku. During his trip in the autumn of 2022, he even stayed in a hotel where a significant number of guests were Iranian tourists. Some of them knew that there were also Israelis among the guests. While the Iranian tourists did not go out of their way to interact with Israelis, they showed no hostility toward them either. It was striking that they had come to escape the strict restrictions imposed on Iranians by the Islamic regime—most notably the ban on alcohol for Muslims. In Azerbaijan, by contrast, alcohol is freely available. Nevertheless, the presence of a considerable number of Iranians in Baku, many of whom are ethnic Azerbaijanis, naturally creates an environment in which Iranian intelligence agents can easily blend in.
In conclusion, a few observations regarding Azerbaijanis’ attitudes toward the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. In private conversations in 2022—before the deterioration of Azerbaijani-Russian relations in the winter of 2024/2025, triggered by the downing of an Azerbaijani passenger plane by Russian air defense on December 25, 2024—the majority of Azerbaijanis the author encountered expressed sympathy for Ukraine, though generally rather tepidly. There were also those who sympathized with Russia. They were few, but they did not hide their views. Interestingly, Azerbaijanis who condemned Russian aggression against Ukraine emphasized that many of Russia’s supporters were “Russian-speaking” (including Russian-speaking ethnic Azerbaijanis who watch Russian television) and “Lezgins who have relatives in Russia.”
In any case, it can be assumed that at present, with the Azerbaijani authorities having taken a clearer pro-Ukrainian stance and having imposed restrictions on Russian propaganda (including the closure of the Russian House in Baku), these measures have likely influenced public sentiment in Azerbaijan regarding the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
