HISTORIC VISIT

The first ever Middle East tour of the Azerbaijani foreign minister started with Palestine, where Elmar Mammadyarov held talks with Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and his Palestinian counterpart Riyad al-Maliki. At the meetings, Mammad-yarov once again stated the position of Azerbaijan on the Middle East: Baku supports a Middle East conflict solution in compliance with the two-state principle with the capital of Palestine in East Jerusalem. Within the framework of this position, Azerbaijan, which stands for the speedy restoration of peace in the region, will continue to support Palestine, including in international organizations.

In turn, the Palestinian side expressed its gratitude to Azerbaijani partners for the fact that, having great authority in various international organizations, especially in the UN Security Council, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Non-Aligned Movement, Azerbaijan supports Palestine.

Recently, Azerbaijan-Palestine relations have seen marked activity - over the past two years, Baku has been visited by several delegations of Palestinian senior officials. However, these visits were not so much due to bilateral relations as the intention of Palestine to enlist the support of Azerbaijan during last year's UN vote to secure the recognition of the autonomy as an independent subject of international law. However, today in the Azerbaijani-Palestinian negotiations, along with the issues of cooperation in international organizations, the outlines of bilateral cooperation can also be seen. In any case, it is gratifying that today relations between Azerbaijan and Palestine are characterized by prospects for mutually beneficial cooperation in the political, economic and humanitarian spheres rather than by the sad fact of Armenian subversive groups training in Palestinian camps to participate in fighting and terrorist attacks on the territory of Azerbaijan as it was in the early 1990s.

At the same time, observers monitored the visit of the delegation led by Elmar Mammadyarov to Israel with a pretty big interest. Here, the Azerbaijani minister was received at the highest level - Elmar Mammad-yarov met with the president and the prime minister of Israel. President Shimon Peres described the visit as "historic" at the meeting, as the foreign minister of Azerbaijan visited Israel for the first time since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries. He added that the visit of the Azerbaijani foreign minister helps strengthen bilateral relations between the two countries. The Israeli president said that the unique geographical position makes Azerbaijan a key country in the region. Peres praised Azerbaijan for its policy of peace. "Azerbaijan has been taking a clear position against terror and war and is willing to achieve peace in the troubled region, which is not free from terror and violence," Peres said. In this context, the president stressed that one of Azerbaijan's neighbours - Iran - is "the greatest threat". This country, he said, is funding terror, is developing nuclear weapons and is threatening the stability of the Middle East.

At the meeting between the Azerbaijani foreign minister and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the sides exchanged views on the Middle East developments and expressed satisfaction with the current level of relations between the two countries. It was noted that Mammadyarov's visit to the Middle East will contribute to relations between Baku and Tel Aviv.

On his return to Baku, the Azerbaijani foreign minister, while commenting on his visit to the Middle East, expressed regret about the fact that he could not meet with Mahmoud Abbas as the Palestinian leader had to urgently fly to Istanbul for a meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry.

What makes the Azerbaijani delegation's visit to the Middle East so notable? First of all, the outcome of Mammadyarov's negotiations showed the incorrectness of the assumption of those who thought that the main purpose of this trip was to visit Israel, not Palestine. As Baku originally stated, it was assistance in resolving the crisis in the Middle East that was the main subject of the talks, which is proved by their results that were made public. Of course, no one has any illusions that the small Azerbaijan will be able to unravel the Middle Eastern knot, about which the major powers of the world have been scratching their heads since the middle of the last century. However, the republic could play a role in the elimination of tensions in the region as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council and a country that has good relations with both sides of the conflict. It is not by chance that during the negotiations in the Middle East and later - during a visit to Baku by OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, an important agreement was reached on holding a major international conference on Palestine in the Azerbaijani capital. The event is scheduled for June.

As for Israel and the Jewish lobby, this country is really a reliable ally of Azerbaijan and has repeatedly given Baku practical assistance on important issues. It is the Jewish lobby that should be credited for the "freezing" of the discriminatory anti-Azerbaijani Section 907 to the Freedom Support Act adopted by US legislators in the early 1990s. In addition, Israel is one of the largest suppliers of weapons to Azerbaijan today - at a time when some former partners of the country refused to do so.

Israel is also one of the largest consumers of Azerbaijani oil and military partners of Azerbaijan, but so far bilateral contacts between the leaderships of the two countries have taken place either on Azerbaijani territory or on the territory of third countries, but not in Israel. Although the reason for this was not named, representatives of the expert community agreed that this was due to Azerbaijan's reluctance to annoy its southern neighbour. For the same reasons, in their opinion, Azerbaijan has not yet opened its embassy in Tel Aviv. Indeed, Tehran has an extremely negative view of any contacts between Azerbaijan and Israel, and representatives of the Iranian clergy and parliament regularly criticize the Azerbaijani side for behaviour unbecoming of a Muslim country, demanding that the republic break off relations with the "Zionist regime".

However, Mammadyarov's visit showed that Iran's fears are groundless. First of all, Baku has never given reason to fear that Azerbaijani territory can be used against Iran, as the American publication Foreign Policy announced a year ago quoting some confidential sources. Azerbaijan is not pursuing a policy of strengthening relations with its neighbours and has not entered the Non-Aligned Movement to allow bombs to be dropped on its own countrymen whose number in Iran, according to various estimates, is from one-third to half of the population.

The Azerbaijani foreign minister's visit to the Middle East demonstrated first of all that Baku intends to continue to act in national interests without consulting anyone. The Azerbaijani foreign minister's visit to Palestine and Israel showed that Azerbaijan, even in attempts to eliminate the most serious crises, will continue to operate on the basis of a balanced policy. The visit to the problem region is evidence that Azerbaijan will remain true to the previously announced ideals of Islamic unity and that it intends to use its status as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council to reduce the tensions between its co-religionists on the one hand and strategic partner on the other.

A significant event in the history of Azerbaijani-Israeli relations is Azer-baijan's decision to open its embassy in Israel. Mammadyarov told journalists that negotiations were already under way. In other words, there is reason to believe that the Middle East tour of the Azerbaijani de-legation really has a historic nature.