Israel & Trinidad and Tobago: Mirrors & Parallels – Part 1

PART 1 of 3: Israel-Trinidad and Tobago Mirrors and Parallels.

…the foundation for a deeper bilateral relationship between Israel and Trinidad and Tobago is not manufactured. It is organic, it is natural… it is inevitable.

One of the most unique things about Israel is that, because of its peculiar history and the animosity it faced from its neighbors, it exists almost like an island and its people exhibit the characteristics of islanders. Separating Israel from the very real islands of Trinidad and Tobago are the Mediterranean Sea, the continent of Africa and the Atlantic Ocean; Israel and Trinidad and Tobago could not seem more distant, with few, if any, on-the-surface reasons for pursuing a close relationship outside of the diplomatic ties that the two countries share. But the two countries are deeply similar, and they are candidates to be best friends because the parallels between them are remarkable.

Israel’s population is just around 9 million, and Trinidad and Tobago’s is at 1.4 million; yet both countries are outsized in the regional geopolitics, commerce, finance, and culture of their geographic spheres. Since the Israeli response to the October 7 Hamas attacks, Israel has decisively demonstrated that it is the dominant power of the Middle East. Trinidad and Tobago has traditionally occupied the leadership role in the English-speaking Caribbean and remains the financial powerhouse of region. Both countries occupy strategic geographic positions: Israel at the crossroads of the Middle East, Africa, and Europe; Trinidad & Tobago, sitting at the southern tip of the Caribbean, adjacent to South America, is the gateway to the Americas.

Historically, the ties between the countries reach back to before the creation of an independent Trinidad and Tobago. Seeking Israeli support for Trinidadian independence, Trinidad and Tobago’s Premier and future Prime Minister, Dr. Eric Williams, made an official visit to Jerusalem in June 1962, where he met with Israeli Prime Minister, David ben Gurion, who freely gave Israel’s support to the request. On August 30^th, 1962, the day before Trinidad and Tobago officially declared its independence from the United Kingdom, the country received the gift of a Jerusalem Bible from Prime Minister ben Gurion, officially welcoming the islands into the family of nations, and effectively making Israel the first country in the world to recognize Trinidad and Tobago as an independent nation. The next day, Trinidad and Tobago immediately established diplomatic relations with six countries, with one of those being the State of Israel.

The parallels are deeper than the historic ties. Both nations are deeply and complexly pluralistic. Israel navigates Jewish-Arab tensions alongside internal divisions between Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Ethiopian Jews, secular and ultra-Orthodox communities; all of which plays out in the voting booths of Israel on election day as competing agendas, ideologies and hopes for the country come to a head in the ballot slips. Since independence, Trinidad and Tobago’s politics have been shaped by ethnic division rooted in and emanating from the colonial era; the two largest ethnic groups of African and Indian descendants have clashed culturally and competed for economic power, though outside of the election cycle, the country remains a place of relative racial harmony and where “every creed and race find an equal place.”

The Israeli and Trinidadian economies are uncomfortably dependent on respective single dominant revenue sources. For Trinidad and Tobago this reliance is heavily on oil and gas; Israel historically relied on agriculture and defense before tech, and even now the high-tech sector employs just 11% of the workforce, yet generates about 53% of national exports and 20% of GDP, which is a dangerously narrow base. Israel and Trinidad and Tobago both facea similar long-term pressure to diversify before their primary engine runs out.

Despite these pressures, Israel and Trinidad and Tobago remain genuine, vibrant democracies that unfortunately struggle with institutional integrity and coming to terms with the plural expressions of their respective citizenry. The stability of democratic institutions in Trinidad and Tobago is threatened by bureaucratic sluggishness, persistent nepotism and systemic corruption. Narrow margins in both the 2020 general elections and the closely fought 2023 local government elections reflect ongoing party polarization and ethnic rifts, with efforts for greater autonomy in Tobago stalling in the Trinidadian Parliament. Israeli society and the governmental system have been in a prolonged state of crisis since the judicial reform debate began in January 2023, and since Israel came into existence, it has been plagued with constant question of how to balance the democratic and Jewish nature of what the country is and what it should be. Israeli society has experienced divisions that have persisted even outside of times of conflict, with successive coalition governments falling apart based on ideological differences and competing agendas.

To the credit of the governments of both countries, they have each invested their education systems, and have produced highly educated citizens whose expertise is enormously valued around the world; unfortunately, as a result, both Israel and Trinidad and Tobago experience alarming levels of emigration. Israel worries constantly about its tech talent leaving. Unlike countries rich in natural resources or traditional industries, Israel’s primary economic asset of its human capital is mobile and in demand globally and addressing the brain drain is a top priority.  Trinidad and Tobago faces the same dynamic, as professionals in medicine, law, engineering, and finance have been migrating to Canada, the UK, and the US for decades.  And, as the oldest continuous oil producing nation in the world, Trinidadian oil and gas experts are in demand throughout the world and supplying their know-how to other countries. Both Israel and Trinidad and Tobago must confront what is lacking in both societies which has driven so many of their educated professionals to leave.

One of the reasons for the high rates of emigration is the violence both countries must contend with. Israel faces a continuous external existential threat from hostile non-state actors and state adversaries and Trinidad and Tobago faces what experts are calling an internal sovereignty challenge. Professor Ivelaw L. Griffith described Trinidad and Tobago as facing “challenged sovereignty,” because the state’s ability to curb violence within its own borders is tested by organized crime and gang networks.  Trinidad and Tobago recorded 623 homicides in 2024, breaking the previous annual record.  Just as Israel cannot normalize fully under the shadow of security threat, Trinidad and Tobago is finding it difficult to attract sustained investment, retain talent and assure citizens under the shadow of crime. Israelis and Trinidadians are forced to live underconstant fear: from fear of unexpected border infiltration and rocket attacks in Israel, to the ever-present fear of home invasions and shootings in Trinidad. This violence both countries face largely emanates from armed, non-state actors. Israel contends with it at the macro level with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi proxies. Trinidad and Tobago mirrors this at a smaller scale, where organized crime is primarily fed by illicit trade in drugs, weapons, and humans, with cross-border movement from Latin America through the Caribbean. Elements within some Trinidadian governments have been known to work with gangs, using taxpayer resources; the Israeli government used to handle their own problems by maintaining the status quo and channeling money to Hamas, in the hope that economic motivations would curb Hamas’ genocidal ambitions.

What is clear is that the extent of the security threat both countries face means that they have both suffered immense fiscal strain from spending on alleviating threats and protecting lives. Israel’s permanently elevated security spending levels constrains the government’s ability to invest in other priorities, and the overall deficit remains dangerously high by developed economy standards.  Trinidad and Tobago faces an analogous bind, as the ongoing decline in the energy sector, which contracted by 5.4% in recent years, is a glaring indictment of a lack of foresight, and unemployment, foreign exchange shortages, crime, and poor infrastructure continue to cripple the economy.  Both governments are spending reactively on security rather than proactively on growth. Israel’s Bank of Israel and Ministry of Finance have repeatedly stated that the current government’s priorities do not align with the economic challenges facing the state.  In Trinidad and Tobago, governments have been known to channel funds to gangs through various “initiatives” that have evidently failed, and these governments need to be held accountable.  In both cases, professional institutions are being overridden or undermined by political considerations.

Tourism, also, in both countries has suffered; although neither country is dependent on the tourism sector, both see it as a burgeoning industry that can expand economic inflows. Israel has not recovered due to the constraints of the war, and this sector is very sensitive to political threats and less resilient than other sectors of the Israeli economy.  Trinidad and Tobago similarly sees its tourism stunted by its crime reputation, and Tobago, which depends on tourism far more than Trinidad, suffers disproportionately from this.

At the deepest level, Israeli and Trinidadian societies are grappling with the same fundamental tension: how does a small, diverse, democratic nation maintain cohesion, security, and prosperity when powerful external and/or internal forces are constantly testing its sovereignty and institutions?

Israel attempts to do so under existential military pressure, tribal politics, and a global campaign to demonize and delegitimize it. Trinidad and Tobago attempts to do so under the existential pressure of organized crime, ethnic politics, and resource dependency. The pressures themselves differ, but the institutional, fiscal, and social strains they produce are strikingly similar. Two countries, oceans apart, facing the same worries, problems and considerations; two countries, closer than they imagine, and who should be coming together at exactly the right time in this moment to launch the deepest and most beneficial relationship beyond anything either could ever imagine.

Politics in Israel and Trinidad and Tobago

In both countries, what looks like a “right vs. left” contest is actually ethnic and communal frenzy, dressed in ideological clothing.

For most of Israel’s early history, the country was dominated by left-leaning, secular politicians. But today, the right holds the reins of power, representing a movement that uses a religious framework to define Israel and its borders, and which has aggressively resisted a two-state solution with Palestinians. Following the Knesset elections held in November 2022, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party formed a coalition government that was widely described as the most right-wing in Israeli history.  Prime Minister Netanyahu leads a bloc that is ideologically homogeneous in ways never before seen, with a majority of religious nationalists and ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) parties, held together by a type of theocratic Judaism, which has manifested primarily as intensified repression of the peace process with the Palestinians. What is particularly notable is how this rightward shift has been weaponized institutionally. The objectives of Israel’s most right-wing coalition extend beyond merely reforming the judiciary; the coalition’s campaign adopted rhetoric characteristic of right-wing populist movements, which emphasizes national pride, security, law and order, and the promotion of traditional Jewish values. Attacks on state institutions and the idea of state impartiality resemble the Hungarian case, where a coordinated assault on institutions led to the consolidation of an “illiberal democracy,” in which loyalty to party and leader has replaced allegiance to liberal-democratic institutions.

Trinidad’s political story is subtler but structurally similar. The People’s National Movement (PNM) governed with nationalist, left-leaning, socialist-welfare, culturally conservative instincts anchored in Afro-Trinidadian identity. The United National Congress (UNC), traditionally associated with Indo-Trinidadian communities and born out of the labor movement, is now nominally center-right but in practice governed through patronage and communal politics rather than genuine ideological conviction, though this has changed in the past year. rThe 2025 election resulted in a UNC landslide, with analysts noting the new Prime Minister’s favorable disposition toward Trump compared to the PNM’s closeness toward Maduro’s Venezuela. This a telling sign of the rightward geopolitical shift now underway in Port-of-Spain, which puts the country closer to both the US and Israel in its political outlook. However, political divisions persist through narrow margins and ethnic rifts, with party polarization driven more by ethnicity than ideology.

In both countries, what looks like a “right vs. left” contest is actually ethnic and communal frenzy, dressed in ideological clothing. Likud versus Labor maps roughly onto Jewish ethnoreligious constituencies. PNM versus UNC maps onto African versus Indian descent communities. The political divide is less applied to Israeli and Trinidadian shifts to capitalism (while both still guard the welfare offered to the citizenry from their historical socialist pasts) and is instead more applicable to tribal and racial tensions, despite the fact that the citizenry of both countries continue suffer from rising costs of living and a political elite which seem far removed from their everyday concerns and problems.

Israel presents one of the most striking modern examples of a country that shed socialist founding ideology and embraced hyper-capitalism while retaining the architecture of a welfare state. Early Israel was built on Labor Zionism: kibbutzim, Histadrut (the massive labor federation), state-owned enterprises, and universal health coverage. From the 1980’s onward, particularly under Likud, Israel privatized aggressively and built its celebrated “Start-Up Nation” economy. However, the 2025 budget places most of the burden on Israel’s working population, including increases in National Insurance contributions, freezing of income tax brackets, and cuts in education, health, and welfare budgets, while containing no significant reduction of coalition funds for ultra-Orthodox parties.  The ultra-Orthodox Haredi community, a key coalition partner, benefits from massive state subsidies (yeshiva stipends, child allowances, housing support) while resisting integration into the market economy. Israel is simultaneously a high-tech capitalist powerhouse and a state that redistributes enormous resources to communities that reject capitalism’s work ethic.

Trinidad and Tobago’s version of this tension is equally sharp. The country built one of the Caribbean’s most extensive welfare states on petroleum revenues: subsidized fuel, free tertiary education at the University of the West Indies (though this is now restricted and more limited), a vast state enterprise sector, and expansive social transfers. The economy remains trapped in a cycle of dependency on dwindling energy revenues, with no clear diversification strategy and ongoing decline in the energy sector. The UNC campaigned on increasing public sector salaries, protecting pensions, and reopening the state oil company Petrotrin (all explicitly socialistic economic promises) while also signaling warmer ties to Washington and global capital markets. Last week, the Trinidadian government attracted the World Bank to establish its regional headquarters in Port of Spain; a clearly capitalist move. Both major parties have oscillated between rhetorical capitalism (privatization, FDI attraction) and actual socialist practice (state enterprises, subsidies, patronage hiring).

Israel and Trinidad and Tobago have economies where the state simultaneously plays market cheerleader and welfare provider, and where the political coalition holding power depends on distributing state resources to communal constituencies, whether it is Haredi communities in Israel, or loyal ethnic blocs in Trinidad and Tobago. Neither country can fully privatize without dismantling the political blackmail of constituents that sustain their governments.

Islamist Fundamentalism as a Domestic Threat

Israel faces Islamism as an external civilizational threat that shapes its entire security doctrine. Trinidad faces it as an internal social pathology that shapes its crime and counterterrorism reality. For both, the democratic state is caught between security imperatives and civil liberties, between hardline responses and addressing root causes.

Israel faces Islamism in its most militarized form, confronting Hamas (a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot governing Gaza), Hezbollah (Iran-backed Shi’a militia in Lebanon), and the broader Iranian revolutionary project. These are not marginal actors but state-level and quasi-state-level forces. A major ongoing regional dilemma is the proliferation of non-state heavily armed actors and militias: five regional states do not have a state-run monopoly of power within their own borders, including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, and Yemen. Israel is the primary target of this Islamist arc, with the Islamists gaining their greatest victory over Israel in the October 7 massacre.

Trinidad and Tobago’s Islamist problem is less existential but deeply structural. The country’s first brush with Islamic radicalism came when the Jamaat al-Muslimeen  (JaM) launched a coup attempt in 1990, led by Yasin Abu Bakr. Although Islamist groups in Trinidad and Tobago have not carried out significant domestic attacks since, they have ushered in a new reality of gang crime and violence, and incoming Pakistani mullahs have preached a Wahabi version of Islam, introducing and reinforcing antisemitic and anti-Western rhetoric into the Trinidadian Muslim community, which accounts for about 6% of the population. Even more alarming is Trinidad and Tobago’s global ISIS profile. ISIS recruited more foreign fighters per capita from Trinidad and Tobago than from any other country in the Americas. Trinidad has become the epicenter of radical jihadi sentiment in the Caribbean, some of which has found expression in violent criminal gangs. The drivers for radicalization have been complex, encompassing historical links to Islamist extremism, rising socioeconomic inequality, and poor race relations. With poor economic prospects and high crime rates, many young Black Trinidadians do not believe the government is doing enough for them and many have converted to Islamist Islam. The rise of crime and radical Islam in Trinidad could be replicated in other Caribbean countries, particularly those already contending with social challenges. Countries such as Guyana and Suriname, also hosting Muslim minorities, could potentially be at risk of contagion. The further spread of gangster jihad would present a significant challenge to both regional and U.S. homeland security.

In both cases, Islamist fundamentalism fills a vacuum created by state failure, economic exclusion, and identity grievance. In Gaza and Lebanon, Islamism grew where the post-colonial Arab state failed to deliver dignity and services. In Trinidad and Tobago’s urban Afro-Trinidadian communities, the JaM and ISIS affiliates recruit gang members where the state failed to deliver economic inclusion and justice.

The irony is profound: Israel faces Islamism as an external civilizational threat that shapes its entire security doctrine. Trinidad faces it as an internal social pathology that shapes its crime and counterterrorism reality. For both, the democratic state is caught between security imperatives and civil liberties, between hardline responses and addressing root causes.

The rightward drift of Jerusalem and Port of Spain, the capitalism-socialism tension, and the Islamist challenge share a common root: the failure of the liberal-secular founding promise to deliver equitable prosperity and social cohesion. In Israel, Labor Zionism’s vision of an egalitarian Jewish democracy has regressed into ethno-religious nationalism and tech-sector inequality. In Trinidad and Tobago, the Williams-era nationalism’s vision of a post-colonial multiracial prosperity has degenerated to ethnic clientelism, resource dependency, and ungoverned spaces where radical ideologies flourish. The political right in both countries has benefited enormously from these discontents by channeling them to ensure future votes instead of solving them.

PART 2 will be published soon.