Diplomatic travel plans reflect J’lem’s shifting ties
The recent travel itinerary of senior Israeli officials spotlights the shifting sands of Israeli diplomacy and how the country’s web of worldwide ties has expanded dramatically over the last two decades.
On Sunday, Transportation Minister Miri Regev and three other top officials in her ministry began a weeklong trip to Morocco.
On Monday, Foreign Minister Ell Cohen held meetings in Croatia at the beginning of a four-country visit to Central Europe. And on Tuesday, President Isaac Herzog will visit Azerbaijan for the first-ever Israeli presidential visit.
If 20 years ago, the primary destination for Israeli ministers and its president were in America and Western Europe, today, they fly as frequently to capitals in Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
For example, Cohen is expected to visit the Philippines in early June, making him the first Israeli foreign minister to visit that country in some 60 years. Most of the 15 countries he has visited during his first five months in office have been outside Western Europe.
Regev’s visit to Morocco has not made much substantive news. However, the press did question whether she needs to spend a week in that North African country, when her official business there will reportedly only take up to two days.
That this, however, is what is attracting the most attention about her visit, not that an Israeli minister is traveling to Morocco and signing several transportation accords with a key Arab state, shows how much things have changed and how these types of visits – which just five years ago would have merited major headlines – are now routine.
Herzog’s trip to Azerbaijan is another case in point. Although his visit will surely generate bigger headlines in Israel than Regev’s trip to Morocco – because it is the first-ever visit of an Israeli president to Azerbaijan, a Shi’ite state that borders Iran – here, too, it will not get the same press as it would have received 10 years ago.
Why not? Because in the interim, there have been numerous ministerial visits back and forth, including a brief visit to Azerbaijan in 2016 by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the interim, Azerbaijan opened up an embassy in Israel, and Israel’s strategic ties with the
country – including Israeli arms sales to Baku and Azerbaijan’s sale of oil to Israel – have become well known and well documented.
Call it the banality of Israel’s ties with the Islamic world.
These ties have become ho-hum, because they have become routine. These visits don’t generate as much of a buzz as one might expect – in April, Cohen went to Turkmenistan, another Islamic state that borders Iran, to only minimal fanfare – because they have become regular.
The very regularity of these visits, including presidential and ministerial visits to the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, is actually what is newsworthy and shows the degree to which Israel is slowly being seen as a natural fixture in the region.
Israel has had formal ties with Azerbaijan for years and informal relations with Morocco long before the signing of the Abraham Accords. So, why do these visits matter?
They matter, because if in the past the relations were purposefully kept out of the spotlight and well out of the sight of those who might take umbrage, now they are out in the open for all to see. And that difference is significant.
If there are few high-profile visits or meetings, if the relationship is purposefully carried out under the radar, then the message projected is that there is something wrong