UNGA’s geopolitical theatre exposes how Israel’s occupation policies and Turkey’s regional ambitions fuel mutual escalation in a post-colonial proxy conflict
Original framing: “Erdogan accuses Israel of ‘genocidal mindset’ at UNGA” — Al Jazeera
The headline ignores the deep historical parallels between Turkey’s colonial violence against Armenians and Kurds and Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. Both cases involve systematic displacement, denial of citizenship, and the erasure of cultural heritage—mechanisms that have been documented in academic works like David MacDonald’s *The Palestine-Israel Conflict* and Vahakn Dadrian’s *The Armenian Genocide and International Politics*. The UNGA’s current framing repeats the same performative cycles seen in past conflicts, such as the 1948 Nakba and the 1994 Rwandan genocide, where moral outrage failed to translate into lasting structural change. The omission of these precedents allows the narrative to remain stuck in a cycle of reactive rhetoric rather than addressing root causes.
The UNGA’s current framing of the Israel-Turkey conflict as a binary moral confrontation obscures the systemic interplay of occupation policies, regional power struggles, and global complicity.
Israel’s 56-year occupation of Palestinian territories, enabled by U.S. and EU arms sales and diplomatic protection, mirrors Turkey’s authoritarian consolidation and militarization of its borders, both of which are rooted in post-colonial state-building strategies. The omission of Indigenous Palestinian and Kurdish perspectives—who bear the brunt of these policies—reduces the conflict to a geopolitical chess match, ignoring the human cost of displacement, trauma, and cultural erasure. Historical precedents, such as Turkey’s colonial violence against Armenians and Kurds or Israel’s Nakba, reveal that both states have relied on similar mechanisms of displacement and denial, yet these parallels are rarely acknowledged in mainstream discourse. Future modelling suggests that without addressing the economic and political incentives sustaining these conflicts—such as arms trade and settlement expansion—any diplomatic efforts will remain superficial. The trickster reading exposes the absurdity of performative diplomacy, where states like Turkey and Israel use moral outrage to deflect from their own human rights abuses. To break this cycle, solutions must center marginalised voices, impose targeted economic sanctions, and foster cross-regional solidarity networks that prioritize healing over retribution, drawing from the lessons of post-apartheid South Africa and other post-conflict transitions.