Kazakhstan
The revolutionary rhetoric and practices corresponding to the โsecond stage of the Islamic Revolutionโ proclaimed by IRI leaders two decades ago have in some cases proved unproductive in building Tehranโs bilateral relations with a number of Muslim states.ย This includes post-Soviet Central Asia.
Iran has been an active player in Central Asia for more than three decades, arguing for its special role in the development of the post-Soviet states of this sub-region โ Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. For Iran, the existence of ties with Central Asian states is a continuation of centuries-old traditions of historical and cultural relations interrupted during the Soviet era.
Israel is perceived as an important part of the Western, American-centric world. Consequently, relations with Israel are seen as a component of an intricate set of strategies in the multi-vector foreign policy of Central Asian governments. This policy aims to maintain a delicate balance, primarily in the triangle of relations among the three key powers in Eurasia: China, Russia and the West.
The countries of Central Asia cooperate closely with Israel, primarily in the economic sphere. Following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, all Central Asian countries issued statements expressing โconcernโ about the escalation around the Gaza Strip. At the United Nations, the Central Asian countries, albeit cautiously, joined the majority that did not support Israel. On December 12, Central Asian countries (except Turkmenistan yet again) supported a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip for humanitarian purposes. Israel's representative at the UN deemed this resolution hypocritical as it did not mention the Hamas attack on Israel.
After the Second Karabakh War (2020) and especially after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine (2022), France saw a number of new diplomatic opportunities opening up for it in the southern post-Soviet space as Russia's traditional influence waned.
In November 2023, the BESA Post-Soviet Conflict Research Program published a series of texts, half of which focus on the recent surge of anti-Semitism in the region of interest, and the rest on the recent dynamics of military supplies in the South Caucasus, Russian-Georgian relations, and the electoral behavior of Kazakhstan's Russian-speaking minority.
BESA Post-Soviet Conflicts Research Digest No. 1 (September-October 2023)
The Hamas attack on Israel triggered a wave of antisemitism in the South Caucasus and Central Asia. The root causes of this surge are similar: anti-Israeli propaganda in Russia (which is anti-liberal and anti-Western in nature) and in the Islamic world (usually of a specifically religious nature), as well as in the West (typically taking on an extreme leftist nature).
In the months after 21 September 2022, when the Kremlin announced military mobilization, nearly a million Russian citizens entered Kazakhstan; though, two-thirds had already left the country before January 2023. ย The reason for the unexpected rise in popularity of migration to the Central Asian state was that Russian citizens do not need a visa or even a โforeign travelโ passport to go there.