Israeli-Arab ambassador discusses cooperation with Azerbaijan

Azerbaijani site Trend.az has an interview with George Deek, the Arab Christian ambassador of Israel to Azerbaijan, discussing areas of cooperation and historic ties between the nations.

There are many Israeli companies in various fields that are ready to cooperate with Azerbaijan in the liberated territories, Ambassador of Israel to Azerbaijan George Deek told Trend.

As he said, Israel has expressed its readiness for cooperation in the liberated territories of Azerbaijan in the field of agriculture, water resources management, and mine clearance.

“So, these are the main fields, which I believe we can cooperate: de-mining, reconstruction, agriculture, water, but of course we also see the opportunities for cooperation and sharing the know-how in various fields, for example, it can be in healthcare,” added the ambassador.

In terms of overall cooperation between the countries’ the ambassador noted that Israel and Azerbaijan can develop relations in the agriculture and water management sectors.

“There’s no reason why we can't work together with Azerbaijan to help bring up the agricultural sector in Azerbaijan, using Israeli technologies from greenhouses to drip irrigation, to different spices and grains and the fertilizers that we use and have developed,” said the ambassador.

He also noted that the same applies to the field of water management.

In addition, he said Israel is capable of cooperating with Azerbaijan in any other areas as well.

“For example, the field of healthcare. We have a lot of humanitarian projects, we brought in the eye doctors a few months ago, we also contributed some medical equipment to hospitals, to the ministry of health and TABIB during the last war [second Karabakh war] and also afterward, but we believe that we can do a lot, for example training nurses, internship for doctors to go for a few months to Israel or have them work one year in Israel in a local hospital, to get experience and return back," Deek explained.

Also, the ambassador pointed out tourism, as one of the areas of development.

"In 2016 there were around 10,000 Israeli tourists coming to Azerbaijan, in 2019, only 3 years later we had 50,000 – 5 times higher in 3 years. Unfortunately, last year and even this year with the COVID-19, this has gone drastically down as everywhere, but hopefully when we 'open the gates again', then we will see the surge in tourism from 50,000 maybe to even 100,000," he concluded.

One statistic that Deek said surprised me: he says there are some 30,000 Jews in Azerbaijan, which would make it the Muslim-majority nation with the most Jews in the world. I couldn't verify that number - most sources I find show less than half of that - but even so, that would still mean it has more Jews than any Muslim majority country, with the possible exception of Turkey.

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