A senior aide to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has confirmed that Baku pressured Israel to drop its recognition of the Armenian Genocide, telling Turkish television that the intervention was carried out to protect the interests of “brotherly Turkey.”
Hikmet Hajiyev, Aliyev’s foreign policy adviser, said in an interview with the Turkish news channel Haber Global that Israel’s move to recognize the genocide was a “red line” for Baku. “Since the interests of brotherly Turkey have always been a priority for Azerbaijan, this issue is an unchanging ‘red line’ for us,” he said. Hajiyev said Aliyev personally ordered his government to contact Israel immediately after the recognition, which he called “unfair,” saying it “does not reflect historical reality” and was “unacceptable.” Israel took Baku’s concerns seriously, he said.
The admission confirms what Israel’s own government had refused to acknowledge. When the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported last month that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had personally blocked the Knesset vote after being contacted by Hajiyev on Aliyev’s behalf, the account rested on an anonymous Israeli source, and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar’s office denied that the vote had been canceled because of Netanyahu’s intervention. Hajiyev, the official Haaretz named, has now confirmed the contact himself.
The recognition, unanimously approved by Israel’s cabinet on June 28, required a Knesset vote to become binding state policy. That vote was pulled from the agenda before the parliament’s summer recess and cannot be revived until after Israel’s October 27 elections, if a future government takes it up at all.
A Joint Turkic Front
Hajiyev said Azerbaijan intervened on Turkey’s behalf as much as its own. “Where there is no Turkey, there is Azerbaijan, and where there is no Azerbaijan, there is Turkey,” he said. “We resolutely respond to every step directed against the interests of our countries and will continue to do so in the future.” Turkey, the successor state to the Ottoman Empire that carried out the genocide, and Azerbaijan, its closest ally, both reject the recognition of the systematic killing of 1.5 million Armenians as genocide, and both condemned Israel’s cabinet decision when it passed.
Inside the Israel-Azerbaijan Alliance
Azerbaijan used Israeli-supplied weapons in September 2023 to ethnically cleanse more than 120,000 Armenians from occupied Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), emptying the region of its Armenian population within days. The state that carried out that campaign has now reached into Israel’s parliament to keep the killing of those Armenians’ ancestors from being named a genocide.
The two countries are bound tightly. Azerbaijani crude accounted for roughly 46 percent of Israel’s oil imports in 2025, its single largest source, while Israel has supplied roughly 70 percent of Azerbaijan’s major arms imports in the years surrounding its wars against Armenia, including the loitering munitions and drones that proved decisive in emptying Artsakh. Israeli forces have also operated from Azerbaijani territory against Iran, CNN reported. Israel pulled the recognition to protect that partnership.
Pressure on Armenia’s Constitution
In the same interview, Hajiyev pointed to Baku’s pressure on Yerevan. Azerbaijan has refused to sign a final peace treaty with Armenia until Yerevan strips its constitution of a passage referencing the country’s 1990 Declaration of Independence, which Baku claims invokes a 1989 act uniting Armenia with Nagorno-Karabakh.
“We expect that the provision that stipulates territorial claims to Azerbaijan and Turkey will be removed from the Armenian Constitution,” Hajiyev said, adding that Baku expects a new Armenian constitution to be drafted and a referendum possibly held. Once “territorial claims” are removed from the preamble, he said, Azerbaijan sees “no obstacle to signing a final peace treaty.”
