Scrolling online, I came across a banner showing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alongside Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Radovan Karadžić and Joseph Stalin. It bore the caption: “Once convicted, he will join the ranks of modern history’s architects of genocide.”

The post, published by Turkish state-owned media outlet, TRT, takes its direction from the increasingly confrontational rhetoric set by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan toward Netanyahu and Israel.

In recent speeches, particularly as tensions mounted between Ankara and Jerusalem over Syria, Erdogan has considerably upped the ante. In his recent speeches, he frames Israel as a regional destabilizer, while presenting Turkey as the counter-power. His language toward Netanyahu has also become more personal, accusing him of being a politically dying leader manufacturing confrontation with Turkey for electoral purposes.

There may very well be some truth to that. Netanyahu has his own political calculations. Erdogan, however, is also using Gaza for something much larger than a foreign policy dispute with Israel.

Gaza has become a central part of Erdogan’s political language. Ankara wants influence over Israel’s behavior, a role in the postwar order and a place in whatever comes after Hamas. But Erdogan is also increasingly tying Gaza, the West Bank and Al-Aqsa to a wider Turkish historical and political narrative. This became especially pronounced in Ahlat and Malazgirt.

On August 25, Erdogan drew a line between Ahlat, the conquest of Jerusalem and Istanbul. A day later, he again invoked Saladin and Jerusalem while speaking about Turkey’s historical role in a region he says is being reshaped.
Palestine, in other words, is being absorbed into a historical arc running from Seljuk Anatolia, through Jerusalem and the Ottoman experience, to contemporary Turkey. This is where the rhetoric becomes more consequential.

Erdogan is taking a genuine Palestinian catastrophe and folding it into a story about Turkish power, Islamic history and regional guardianship. The language of conquest, religious responsibility and present-day geopolitical ambition increasingly occupy the same space. Palestine becomes more than a cause Turkey supports. It becomes part of a claim about Turkey’s historical place in the region and Erdogan’s own political role within it.

And this is precisely where the question of genocide becomes difficult for Ankara.
Around 1.5 million Armenians are estimated to have died during the mass killings, deportations and persecution carried out against Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. More than a century later, the Turkish state still rejects the characterization of those events as genocide, a position Erdogan has repeatedly defended.

Turkey is perfectly entitled to condemn Israel’s conduct in Gaza. The scale of Palestinian suffering hardly requires Erdogan’s embellishment. What Turkey cannot credibly do is appoint itself an arbiter of historical genocide while denying the genocide embedded in its own modern political inheritance.

The contradiction becomes even more striking when Erdogan himself is invoking Jerusalem, conquest and Ottoman history to build Turkey’s moral claim over the Palestinian cause.
If Ankara wants to speak about the architects of genocide, Turkish history offers a place to begin.