Azerbaijan’s independent foreign policy makes it the most likely place for Turkey and Israel to repair their relationship.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog visited Baku, Azerbaijan, on October 14 for a summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia, which Azerbaijan chairs, and met President Ilham Aliyev at the presidential palace. The visit came amid an open rift between Azerbaijan and Turkey, its closest ally, over the former’s restrictions on headscarves in schools. Turkey has treated the dispute as a question of faith, while Azerbaijan has treated it as a question of sovereignty. Israel has never tried to dictate terms to Azerbaijan. That record, along with Azerbaijan’s long alliance with Turkey, makes Baku the likeliest place for Turkey and Israel to settle their differences eventually.

The rift began with a domestic decision. On September 21, Azerbaijan’s cabinet adopted school uniform rules barring items inconsistent with the secular character of public education. The rules do not mention the hijab specifically, but schools began turning away pupils and teachers who wore headscarves, and protests followed. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticized school headscarf restrictions in his speech to the UN General Assembly without naming Azerbaijan. His chief advisor and lawmakers from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) called on Azerbaijan to reverse the decision. Aliyev’s New Azerbaijan Party answered publicly, asking Turkish politicians to respect Azerbaijan’s sovereignty and internal affairs and noting that Turkey’s own constitution is officially secular as well. 

Turkey’s own record complicates its criticism. It barred headscarves in public institutions until 2013 and in secondary schools until 2014. When the Turkish Cypriot administration, which depends heavily on Turkey, changed the rules in 2025 under Turkey’s pressure to allow headscarves in high schools, several thousand people marched through northern Nicosia to defend secular education. That October, Turkish Cypriots voted out Ersin Tatar, the leader most closely aligned with Turkey, in a landslide. 

Beneath the dispute lies a difference in how the two governments see the relationship. Heydar Aliyev, the current president’s father, described Turkey and Azerbaijan as “one nation, two states,” and Turkey has long treated Azerbaijan as the younger brother in that family. Azerbaijan does not see itself that way. Like other Central Asian states, Azerbaijan puts its freedom of action above every other interest. It will not become any power’s vassal, whether that power is an adversary or an ally.

That is why Azerbaijan presents itself as a middle power and has spent two decades building the strength to back its claim. Its military, armed with Israeli and Turkish weapons, won the 2020 war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh and retook the rest of the region in 2023. Its oil, gas, and transit routes give Europe, Turkey, and Israel their own reasons to need it. Azerbaijan understands that a country that can defend itself and pay its own way doesn’t have to take orders from anyone.

Azerbaijan has shown that independence whenever a larger neighbor pressed it, including over its relations with Israel. In the fall of 2021, Iran staged military exercises on Azerbaijan’s border, and its foreign minister demanded that Azerbaijan end its partnership with Israel. On October 4 of that year, Aliyev visited a new border unit in Jabrayil, a few miles from Iran, and posed for the cameras with an Israeli Harop loitering munition.

Russia received the same treatment. After Russian air defense shot down an Azerbaijan Airlines jet in December 2024, killing 38 people, Aliyev demanded that Russia admit responsibility and let relations fall into an unprecedented downturn rather than accept less. In October 2025, Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged that Russian missiles had brought the plane down.  Azerbaijan wants to be treated as an equal and wants other capitals out of its internal and foreign policy, and it will absorb real costs to make that point to its largest neighbors.

Israel has taken the opposite approach. It sells Azerbaijan weapons, buys a large share of its oil, and welcomed SOCAR, Azerbaijan’s state energy company, into its own gas sector when SOCAR completed the purchase of a 10 percent stake in the Tamar field in 2025. It leaves Azerbaijan’s politics and other partnerships alone, and handles any disagreements privately. Last week’s meeting readout described a relationship rooted in mutual respect and shared interests, which is precisely the standard  Azerbaijan expects of everyone else. 

The rift with Turkey will not become a rupture, because neither side wants it. Azerbaijan is Turkey’s closest ally and its land bridge to Central Asia. The Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway and the pipelines running from the Caspian to the Turkish coast tie Anatolia to Azerbaijan and to the Turkic states across the sea.  Azerbaijan has also put its resources behind Turkey’s own ventures. When Turkey set out to help rebuild post-Assad Syria, Azerbaijani gas began flowing to Aleppo through a Turkish pipeline in August 2025. 

On September 30, the two governments signed defense contracts worth about $500 million. Azerbaijan supplied roughly 22 percent of Turkey’s gas imports in 2024, and a 15-year gas contract from the Absheron field begins in 2029. Like Russia, Turkey will conclude that cooperating with Azerbaijan yields far more than a costly fight that would isolate it from its own allies. 

Turkey has made such recalculations before. Its embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist movements after the Arab Spring alienated governments across the region, and twice in the past decade the resulting isolation forced Turkey back to a “zero problems with neighbors” policy. In 2016 it restored relations with Israel and repaired ties with Russia. In 2021 and 2022 it once again mended fences, this time with the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel. President Herzog himself visited Ankara in March 2022. 

Turkey’s feud with Israel makes little strategic sense. The two have the strongest militaries in the eastern Mediterranean, both are anchored in the American security network, and both have been targets of Iran. Erdogan’s championing of the Palestinian cause was meant to buy influence in the Muslim world. Still, his open support for Islamists has often alienated the Arab governments whose regard he sought. When Turkey next decides to repair the relationship, it will need an intermediary both capitals trust, and  Azerbaijan has played that role in the region for years. 

Herzog’s visit was a reminder. While in Baku, he also met Bahrain’s foreign minister, Abdullatif bin Rashid al-Zayani, to discuss strengthening the Abraham Accords. Baku has been a meeting ground for Israel and the Gulf since before the accords existed. Chen Baram of Hebrew University’s Truman Institute told Israel Hayom in 2020 that Azerbaijan had quietly helped Israel build relations with the Gulf states and other moderate Muslim countries, and that he had personally seen meetings in Baku between Israelis and senior Arab figures years before those ties became official. 

Once the accords were signed, Baku was among the first places where Israeli and Emirati diplomats made contact. As early as 2012, Israel’s then-foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, spoke of Azerbaijan as a potential mediator between Israel and the Arab world. 

That history has made Azerbaijan a mediator trusted by all sides. Qatar hosts Hamas, and Pakistan does not recognize Israel. Azerbaijan has working relationships with Israel, Turkey, Washington, the Gulf monarchies, and the new government in Damascus, and it has already used them. 

In April and May 2025, Baku hosted Turkish and Israeli officials for talks that produced a permanent direct line to prevent clashes in Syria, and Aliyev later said he had acted to help “our ally and brother Türkiye and our friend Israel.” Azerbaijan also brokered Israeli military contacts with the Syrian government. When Turkish-Israeli tensions flared again this summer, an Azerbaijani official put the question to Israelis bluntly: “What are we supposed to do if, God forbid, you start fighting?” 

Erdogan will eventually want a channel back to Israel, as he did in 2016 and 2022, and the headscarf dispute with  Azerbaijan will fade long before the gas contracts and arms deals between them expire. When he looks for that channel, the likeliest broker will be Azerbaijan, a middle power both Turkey and Israel trust, and one that asks only to be treated as an equal and left to run its own affairs.

About the Author: Joseph Epstein

Joseph Epstein is the director of the Turan Research Center, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, an expert at the N7 Foundation, and a research fellow at the Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University. He also sits on the advisory board of the Alekain Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to providing education to women and girls in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. He specializes in Eurasia and the Middle East, and his work has been featured in various outlets such as Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Hill, the Atlantic Council, Novaya Gazeta, RFE/RL, Foreign Policy, and others.

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