Israel & Trinidad and Tobago: Mirrors & Parallels – Part 3

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

Read PART 1 here. Read PART 2 here.

 Trinidad and Tobago gives Israel something it has almost nowhere in the Caribbean and Latin American context: a democratic, English-speaking, pro-American partner with multilateral reach, a Muslim-minority population and its own painful experience with Islamist radicalization, which gives Trinidad and Tobago every reason to view Israeli counterterrorism expertise as exceptionally relevant in this moment. In turn, Israel gives Trinidad something it cannot get from CARICOM, Venezuela, or even the United States directly: world-class technology in security, agriculture, and innovation; diplomatic amplification in Washington through the pro-Israel network; and a model of how a small, resource-limited, multiethnic democracy can build genuine prosperity under existential pressure.

Everything points toward a natural convergence between Israel and Trinidad and Tobago. They are wo small democracies, both facing Islamist-linked security threats, both navigating right-of-center political realignments, both dependent on Trump’s America, both managing multiethnic societies under pressure, both possessing outsized cultural creativity relative to their size: it demonstrates clearly that 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.

What has prevented the relationship from developing is not incompatibility; rather inertia, geographic distance, and the absence of institutional champions willing to build the connective tissue. It would take deeper analysis and braver steps by both governments to create the relationship needed which would only benefit both societies.

The area where collaboration would bring the biggest and most immediate benefit would be in the area of security, especially to properly confront Trinidad and Tobago’s documented Islamist radicalization problem (remember, it has the highest per-capita ISIS foreign fighter rate in the Americas, gang networks with jihadist nomenclature and ideology, and has has repeatedly struggled to develop effective counterterrorism and deradicalization frameworks). Israel has arguably the world’s most sophisticated counterterrorism doctrine, intelligence architecture, and community-level deradicalization experience which was built over decades of confronting precisely the kind of non-state Islamist actors that Trinidad and Tobago faces internally. The fit is almost perfect. Israel has fought Hamas in urban environments, dismantled tunnel networks, disrupted financing channels, and developed early-warning intelligence systems for radicalization. Trinidad and Tobago needs this urgently and desperately, scaled to a Caribbean context. Israeli firms like Elbit Systems, Rafael, and numerous cybersecurity and surveillance companies have already sold technology to Latin American and Caribbean governments. The pathway exists.

Beyond hardware, Israel’s community policing and intelligence fusion models, built around the concept of layered security where military, police, and civilian intelligence share information in real time, are directly applicable to T&T’s gang-crime-meets-radical-ideology problem. The Persad-Bissessar government has already signaled willingness to adopt hardline security postures and Israel is the natural technical partner for making that posture effective rather than merely rhetorical.

And, of course, Trinidad and Tobago’s ports and the broader Caribbean maritime corridor are now central to US anti-narco operations. Israel’s naval intelligence and maritime surveillance technology which were developed for monitoring Gaza’s coastline and Hezbollah arms smuggling routes has direct applicability in monitoring drug and weapons flows through the southern Caribbean. A Trinidad and Tobago-Israel maritime intelligence arrangement, operating under the umbrella of the existing Trinidad and Tobago-US partnership, would strengthen all three countries simultaneously.

Trinidad and Tobago faces water scarcity, agricultural underdevelopment, and heavy dependence on food imports and it spends hundreds of millions of foreign exchange annually on food which could theoretically and should be produced domestically. Israel has transformed itself from a desert nation into an agricultural exporter through drip irrigation, precision agriculture, desalination, and agri-tech innovation that is now globally exported.

Israeli companies like Netafim (the inventor of drip irrigation), IDE Technologies (desalination), and a constellation of agri-tech startups have worked across Africa, India, and Latin America. The Caribbean has largely been bypassed. A Trinidad and Tobago-Israel agricultural technology partnership could achieve several things simultaneously: reduce Trinidad and Tobago’s food import bill, diversify the economy away from energy dependence, create rural employment, and serve as a demonstration model for CARICOM, thus making Trinidad and Tobago a regional hub for Israeli agri-tech deployment across the Caribbean. This also aligns directly with what the Persad-Bissessar government campaigned on: economic diversification and reducing vulnerability to energy sector decline.

The Israeli “Start-Up Nation” model of building a high-tech economy through a combination of military-trained engineers, university-industry linkages, venture capital culture, and government R&D investment has been studied and partially replicated in Singapore, Rwanda, and Estonia. Trinidad and Tobago has repeatedly attempted tech ecosystem development with limited success, partly because it has looked to the US Silicon Valley model, which is not easily transplanted to small developing economies. The Israeli model is far more applicable and has been shown to be adaptable and adoptable by small countries. Israel started from a small domestic market, limited natural resources (before offshore gas), a highly educated but small workforce, and a security imperative that drove defense-tech innovation with civilian spillover. Trinidad has a comparable starting point: a well-educated workforce, a small market, and a diversification imperative driven by energy decline rather than security threat.

Other specific areas of natural collaboration include cybersecurity (where Israel leads globally and Trinidad and Tobago has critical infrastructure vulnerability), fintech (where Trinidad and Tobago’s banking sector is relatively sophisticated by Caribbean standards), and energy transition technology (where Israeli solar and storage innovation can assist the Trinidadian need to diversify its energy mix as fossil fuel revenues decline).

The governments of both countries can seed a bilateral innovation fund which would attract private co-investment, and this could become the institutional anchor for this collaboration, modeled on Israel’s successful technology transfer frameworks with India and Singapore.

Both countries now share a de facto alignment with Trump’s America and a shared skepticism of multilateral institutions that have failed to address their specific concerns: the UN’s consistent anti-Israel voting pattern on one side, CARICOM’s accommodation of Venezuela’s Maduro on the other. This creates a genuine diplomatic opportunity. Trinidad and Tobago, as a member of CARICOM, the OAS, the Commonwealth, and the Non-Aligned Movement, has multilateral reach that Israel lacks in the Caribbean and Latin American context. Israel has multilateral reach and credibility in Washington, Brussels, and certain parts of Africa that Trinidad and Tobago lacks. Therefore, a closer bilateral relationship creates diplomatic complementarity: Trinidad and Tobago helps Israel navigate Caribbean and Latin American forums more effectively, and should join the Isaac Accords. Israel can help Trinidad and Tobago amplify its voice in Washington policy circles where the pro-Israel lobby  (AIPAC, AJC, ADL) has deep relationships with both Republican and Democratic leadership. The organized American Jewish community’s influence in Washington is one of the most effective diplomatic multipliers a small country can access. A Trinidadian government with genuine, institutionalized ties to Israel gains indirect access to that network for legitimate advocacy on trade, security cooperation, and development assistance that Trinidad and Tobago currently has no effective channel to pursue.

Trinidadian students almost never go to Israeli universities, despite Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, and the Technion being world-class institutions with strong scholarship programs and English-language tracks. Israeli tourists almost never visit the Caribbean beyond cruise stops. Israeli artists and musicians have never engaged meaningfully with calypso and soca traditions, despite the obvious resonances between Israeli Mizrahi music, its African and Middle Eastern roots, and the African-derived rhythmic traditions of Trinidad. Cultural exchange programs of university partnerships, artist residencies, culinary exchanges, festival collaborations and more would do two things simultaneously. Firstly, it would build the people-to-people relationships that make formal cooperation durable rather than transactional. And secondly, it would give both countries soft power tools: Trinidad and Tobago gains access to Israeli creative networks in Europe and North America; Israel gains a genuine Caribbean cultural foothold that counters the BDS movement’s narrative of Israel as a state with no natural allies in the Global South.

But, of course, none of this happens organically. Every successful bilateral relationship between small states requires the institutional champions of people and organizations that maintain the relationship through changes of government, economic cycles, and geopolitical shifts. A Joint Bilateral Commission at the ministerial level, meeting annually, with working groups on security, agriculture, technology, and culture would be the standard architecture for the bilateral relationship that neither country has yet established with the other.

Israel and Trinidad and Tobago are two small countries with more in common than anyone realizes and it is in the benefit of both to forge a genuine strategic partnership between these two nations that share security threats, political trajectories, cultural DNA, diaspora experience, and a common patron in Trump’s Washington. Trinidad and Tobago gives Israel something it has almost nowhere in the Caribbean and Latin American context: a democratic, English-speaking, pro-American partner with multilateral reach, a Muslim-minority population and its own painful experience with Islamist radicalization, which gives Trinidad and Tobago every reason to view Israeli counterterrorism expertise as exceptionally relevant in this moment. In turn, Israel gives Trinidad something it cannot get from CARICOM, Venezuela, or even the United States directly: world-class technology in security, agriculture, and innovation; diplomatic amplification in Washington through the pro-Israel network; and a model of how a small, resource-limited, multiethnic democracy can build genuine prosperity under existential pressure.

Both countries have faced that pressure and both have survived it. That alone is the beginning of a conversation worth having at the highest levels and the foundation of a partnership which would only genuinely benefit both peoples.

Shalom, Israel, this is your new best friend, Trinidad and Tobago. Aye, Trinidad and Tobago, this is your new best friend, Israel. Make the most of your new acquaintance.