Azerbaijan’s silence over Gaza is not surprising

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has publicly called for an end to the "Gaza tragedy." Despite protests from many quarters, however, Azerbaijan remains the main supplier of oil to Israel, which has provided key assistance to Baku in modernizing its army

Last June, after a meeting with his Egyptian counterpart Sisi, President Ilham Aliyev called to end the “tragedy in Gaza”. And yet, Azerbaijan is among those countries that provide Israel with oil, thus fuelling the war in Gaza.

Azerbaijan supplies Israel with about 40% of its oil needs. Last November, during the international climate conference in Baku, advocacy groups seized the opportunity to call on the government of Azerbaijan to halt the supply.

Simultaneously, protests outside Azerbaijani embassies in various capitals also took place with similar demands. Climate activist Greta Thunberg, who was unable to travel to Baku due to all land borders being closed since the start of the pandemic, said Azerbaijan was complicit in Israel’s war on Gaza as a result of a steady flow of fossil fuels to Israel.

In October, Progressive International , a platform that brings together over one hundred organisations with a mission to “unite, organise and mobilise”, called “to act and apply pressure on the actors complicit in fuelling the Israeli genocide via the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline”.

The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (TBC) pipeline carries Azerbaijani oil through Georgia to Turkey's Mediterranean ports from where it is shipped around the world, including Israel. The call to action by Progressive International demands “an energy embargo on Israel with a focus on the BTC pipeline and its two main corporate actors - British Petroleum (BP) and Azerbaijan State Oil Company (SOCAR)”.

These demands and calls are not new. Over the summer, a pro-Palestine group named “The Thousand Youths for Palestine” staged protests outside Azerbaijan’s State Oil Company (SOCAR) offices in Istanbul. Turkey was still involved in trade and shipments to Israel until May 2024, when it announced total restrictions on all trade with Israel until the war on Gaza ends.

But not everyone believes this to be the case. Now-exiled journalist Metin Cihan was among the first ones to point out how the country was continuing to trade with Israel despite the decision to stall all trade relations. On November 29, as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addressed the TRT World Forum, activists asked why Azerbaijani oil was still being shipped to Israel – they were quickly removed from the room.

These, however, were all the right questions, as a recent report by Progressive International and the Stop Fuelling Genocide campaign revealed that a tanker that left the Heydar Aliyev terminal in Ceyhan on October 30 docked at a terminal in Israel on November 5, from where it traveled to Sicily.

The tanker reportedly switched off its tracking signal after reaching the Eastern Mediterranean Sea and switched it back on after reaching Sicily, therefore its stop in Israel was only detected thanks to satellite imagery.

During protests in front of the SOCAR office in Istanbul over the summer, the company denied the direct sale of oil to Israel, asserting that the sale occurs via trading companies. The company then insisted that these trading companies are not monitored or controlled by supplying companies like SOCAR.

Officials in Turkey concur. Speaking in parliament on November 12, AKP Group Deputy Chairman Özlem Zengin said, “700,000 barrels of oil are currently flowing daily from the Baku-Ceyhan Pipeline. This oil belongs to different companies. Turkey has no involvement in the oil flowing through the pipeline. We are responsible for operating this pipeline, but we have no involvement in the oil shipped through the pipeline”.

Zenging also added that Turkey’s Minister of Trade Ömer Bolat, met with all of the companies using the pipeline, all of whom confirmed there was no oil shipped directly to Israel through this pipeline.

On the technical side, Turkey cannot stop the shipments and stall the flow. It is in the agreement signed between Turkey’s state-owned petroleum company TPAO and BP, the largest partner of the BTC pipeline, that forbids any parties to the contract to delay or obstruct the transit of petroleum. Otherwise, Turkey may land in an international court of arbitration.

Israel Azerbaijan ties

Azerbaijan's ties with Israel have long been based on trade in military and surveillance equipment, oil supply and more recently aerospace technology. Israel set up its embassy in the capital Baku in 1993. Azerbaijan started supplying Israel with oil in 1999. The turning point in relations, however, came in 2010. Azerbaijani analyst Zaur Shiriyev told Global Voices that Baku's need to modernise its military and Israel's search for new partners amid deteriorating ties with Turkey brought the two countries closer.

By 2011, Azerbaijan had become Israel's top trade partner and was exporting some 2.5 million tons of oil per year, according to available data during that time. Azerbaijan State Oil Company (SOCAR) subsidiary, the Caspian Drilling Company, signed a deal with Israel's oil field Med Ashdod, gaining a five percent stake and the rights for offshore drilling in the area.

As relations flourished, Azerbaijan upped its spending in Israeli military equipment. In 2015–2019, Israel supplied 60% of arms imports to Azerbaijan, according to data by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. This equipment, as well as the purchase of Israeli drones, helped Azerbaijan win the 44-day war with Armenia in 2020.

Azerbaijan continued to maintain a delicate balance in the wake of Hamas’ October 7 assault on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza. Officially, the country has not condemned Israel. It did “vote in favour of the UN General Assembly resolution calling for an immediate humanitarian truce leading to the cessation of hostilities between Israel and Hamas”, which – wrote foreign policy expert Eldar Mamedov in his opinion piece for Eurasianet in November 2023 –“is about as far as [Azerbaijan] is prepared to go”.

In October 2023, SOCAR was among six companies awarded a license to explore and develop new natural gas reserves in the Eastern Mediterranean. “The winning companies have committed to unprecedented investment in natural gas exploration over the next three years, which would hopefully result in the discovery of new natural gas reservoirs”, Energy Minister Israel Katz reportedly said at the time. The same year, Azerbaijan opened its embassy in Tel Aviv.

In February 2024, President Aliyev met with his Israeli counterpart Isaac Herzog on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. In April 2024, Ministers of Energy from both countries discussed further energy ties during a meeting in Dubai.

While the two governments enjoy strategic ties, the public has also been quiet. There have been no protests or demands except a handful of civic and political activists, voiced by the Azerbaijani public, who are majority Shiite Muslims, calling on the government to take a harsher stance against Israel.

In October 2023, shortly after the war in Gaza started, several online news platforms conducted polls among their readers, based on which two thirds of the respondents expressed support for Israel. The pictures shared by Israel’s Ambassador to Azerbaijan, which show flowers laid outside the embassy, also speak to the level of sympathy among the Azerbaijani people towards Israel.

There is also scant coverage of the war in Gaza in much of the state or government-affiliated media. Against this backdrop, Azerbaijan’s inertia over Gaza is not surprising.