There is a temptation, whenever two regional powers begin to hurl accusations of genocide and dictatorship at each other, to read the moment as a clash of civilizations or incompatible values.
The Turkey-Israel rift invites just that kind of reading: Recep Tayyip Erdogan compares Benjamin Netanyahu to Hitler, Israeli ministers call Turkey “an enemy state in every sense,” Jerusalem suddenly discovers, after a century of careful avoidance, that it has a “moral obligation” to recognize the Armenian genocide.
But a realist lens suggests something less dramatic and more familiar: two middle powers, each overextended, each losing the regional order that once constrained them, aiming whatever instrument—including historical memory—serves an immediate strategic purpose.
Genocide recognition as a state, not an epiphany
Start with the Armenian case, because it is the clearest case of history’s recruitment in today’s influence.
For decades, Israeli governments of every generation refused to use the word “genocide” for the Ottoman-era massacres of Armenians. This was not beyond historiographical doubt – the scholarly consensus was never in serious disagreement – but because Turkey was a valued military and diplomatic partner, and later because Azerbaijan, an important oil source and an intelligence partner against Iran, also strongly opposed recognition.
This calculation lasted for 100 years. That changed within weeks in June 2026, not because new archives emerged, but because Ankara and Jerusalem are now open rivals across Syria, the Eastern Mediterranean and Washington’s corridors of influence.
Time tells the story. This was not a conscientious account; it was a message aimed less at Yerevan than at Ankara—and, more precisely, at the US Congress, where an energized Armenian-American lobby could complicate Turkey’s defense-industrial ambitions and its case for renewed American favor.
Realists have long argued that “moral” foreign policy gestures deserve scrutiny for the interests that lie beneath them; this is as clean an example as one can find.
That doesn’t make the story any less real — the genocide happened and the historical record has never been seriously disputed — but it should make observers skeptical of the idea that Israel discovered a moral truth in 2026 that it somehow couldn’t see in 1996 or 2016. The truth didn’t change — the utility of saying so did.
Turkey’s response was just as significant: officials framed the recognition as a departure from Israel’s own behavior in Gaza, not an occasion for historical reflection. Both governments, in other words, are using a centuries-old atrocity as a rhetorical weapon in a very current war.
Neither side’s position on the underlying facts should be confused with the reasons each is now expressing.
Deeper drivers: geography, not ideology
Strip away the rhetoric and the structural sources of friction are unglamorous and entirely predictable from a balance of power perspective:
Syria. With the disappearance of Bashar al-Assad and the degradation of Iranian-aligned militias, both Ankara and Jerusalem are filling the vacuum, and their preferred clients do not overlap. Turkey supports the new government in Damascus and is arming and training its army.
Israel has repeatedly struck Syrian military assets and supports Druze communities and, more cautiously, the Kurds that Ankara regards with deep suspicion given the history of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). This is a textbook security dilemma: each side’s defensive defense reads like an offensive threat to the other.
Eastern Mediterranean. A deepening Israel-Greece-Cyprus defense and energy partnership — joint exercises, an Israeli sale of air defenses to Cyprus, a new US-backed energy center — boils down directly to Turkey’s “Blue Motherland” maritime claims and its decades-long dispute over Cyprus.
Ankara reads the siege; Jerusalem reads the diversification of alliances away from a Turkey it no longer trusts. Both readings are rational given each capital’s vantage point, which is precisely what makes it difficult to moderate the dynamic through goodwill alone.
The difficult middle of NATO. Turkey’s membership is the strangest variable in the equation. It gives Ankara a security umbrella it increasingly regrets relying on, while giving Washington a headache: an alliance built to deter Russia must now worry about managing a rivalry between a member and its closest non-member partner.
Any US administration that is serious about avoiding a broader Eastern Mediterranean crisis has an interest in keeping this rivalry rhetorical rather than kinetic. But Washington’s bandwidth for that kind of smooth mediation has never been thinner.
The case for limitation
None of this counsels indifference to what is happening – a NATO member (Turkey) and a nuclear-armed US partner (Israel) sliding into confrontation is no small story. But he advises against treating any government’s public framework at face value.
Erdogan’s speech about “liberating Jerusalem” is aimed at a domestic and pan-Islamist audience as much as it is at Israel. Israeli officials calling Turkey the “new Iran” serve to justify further outreach into Syria and closer alignment with Greece and Cyprus, alignments that carry their own risks of escalation.
Genocide recognition, invoked now rather than in any of the previous 40 years it might have been invoked, serves Israel’s immediate contest with Ankara for Washington’s attention.
The realist instinct is not to dismiss the moral content of any of these claims—the Armenian genocide happened, Turkey’s authoritarian move is real, Israel’s behavior in Gaza has drawn serious international scrutiny—but to separate the claims from the time they were made and resist the pull to treat a regional power referendum on regional power rivalry.
What is unfolding between Ankara and Jerusalem is what unrestricted middle powers do when a regional hegemon (in this case, an exhausted American security guarantor) retreats: they defend, stand, and reach for whatever historical or moral instrument is closest.
The job of outside observers, and especially Washington, is to see this clearly rather than pick sides in what is, beneath the rhetoric, an old-fashioned contest for regional position.
it ITEM was originally published in Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist and is reprinted with kind permission. Become a subscriber here.
