Before blaming Israel, Erdogan must face genocide charges himself

On November 7, 2025, a Turkish state court issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and 36 other senior Israeli leaders on charges of genocide. The charges are nonsense, the latest populist stunt by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in his quest to become leader of the world’s 200 crore Muslims, 11 per cent of whom live in India.

The Indian government should not ignore the outrage, for what Erdoğan targets Israel with today, he will apply to India tomorrow. Erdoğan is like a belligerent drunk whose friends coddle and protect him, even as he causes mayhem at home and abroad. When a drunk faces no consequences, his behaviour only becomes more outrageous. Erdoğan may not be an alcoholic like modern Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was, but his behaviour nevertheless demands a response.

If Erdoğan succeeds in forcing any Israeli to court, it is only a matter of time until he and his Pakistani, Qatari, and Malaysian allies try to do the same with democratically elected Indian leaders like Prime Minister Narendra Modi and senior Indian diplomats and military officers as part of a similar “lawfare” campaign to pursue their Kashmir and Khalistan ambitions.

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Many Indians—both old-school members of the diplomatic establishment and leftists—may be sympathetic to the Palestinian case and credulous about the genocide rhetoric, but the facts do not support the polemics. If Israel conducted genocide in Gaza, then it is the first genocide in world history in which the subject people increased in population during the so-called genocide.

While Israel destroyed many structures, it did so only after facilitating the movement of the Palestinian population. The ratio of terrorists killed to civilian collateral damage was lower than any urban combat in history, one-tenth the civilian-to-combatant ratio of the Russia-Chechen war and less than half the civilian-to-combatant ratio of the Battle of Mosul. Erdoğan is largely silent about the civil war in Sudan, the world’s deadliest current conflict, and he seeks to profit from the second most lethal conflict—the Russia-Ukraine War—as he sells weaponry to Ukraine while helping Russia evade sanctions and sell oil.

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The source of the claims that Israel committed genocide in Gaza rests in the uncritical use of “Gaza Health Ministry” numbers. The Gaza Health Ministry is a Hamas entity, and its numbers are largely made up. Here, there is a parallel to the calumny a quarter century ago that five lakh children died due to Iraqi sanctions. The source of that claim was a Unicef report that relied solely upon data provided by Saddam Hussein’s health ministry. The Food and Agricultural Office had done its own surveying in Iraq at the time and found the leading causes of death under sanctions were diabetes and heart disease, hardly the diseases of the starving.

The irony of Erdoğan’s genocide claims today is twofold. First, the founders of modern Turkey were culpable in the genocide of 15 lakh Armenians just over 110 years ago, an event the Turkish government officially denies despite proof of deliberate extermination recorded in the documents of the Ottoman and Turkish states.

Nor were the Armenians alone. Over recent decades, Turkey has targeted Kurds, banning cultural expression and even letters of the alphabet used in Kurdish but not Turkish, arresting Kurdish intellectuals and political leaders, killing tens of thousands of Kurdish civilians, and turning Kurdish neighbourhoods in Diyarbakir, Mardin, and Cizre to rubble.

In Cyprus, too, Erdoğan is guilty of cultural genocide against the relatively liberal Muslim Cypriots, whom he forces to conform to mainland Turkey’s more conservative norms. In recent months, this has led to increasingly vocal protests by Cypriot Muslims struggling under the occupation of the Turkish Army and Turkey’s flood of settlers into the occupied zone. In essence, Erdoğan has done to northern Cyprus what Pakistan’s military leaders have done to Gilgit.

Second, as with all other elements of foreign policy and diplomacy, Erdoğan views genocide through an exclusively religious lens. After the International Criminal Court indicted Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for genocide in Darfur, Erdoğan welcomed Bashir on a visit to Turkey; he explained that the indictment was unjust since “a Muslim could not commit genocide”. Put another way, when Muslims slaughter non-Muslims, it is resistance or justified, but if a Jew or Hindu defends themselves, it is genocide.

Erdoğan sees himself as exceptional and on a divine mission; he wants to be judge and jury but refuses to subordinate himself to the same standards. As a state that suffers terrorism by groups that Turkey supports or applauds, ranging from Kashmir terror groups based in Pakistan to Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, India has a unique standing to defend Turkey’s victims. If Indian courts charge Erdoğan with genocide, they will not only be doing what is morally right and establishing India as a state that puts human rights at the center of its policy, but they will also be putting Turkey on notice that it will be judged by the standards by which Erdoğan seeks to judge others.

(Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum in Washington, DC. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)