Yair Netanyahu’s 2021 Tweets on Turkey and the Greek Genocide

First published May 20, 2021.

On 13 May 2021, in the middle of the Israel–Gaza war, Yair Netanyahu, the son of then Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, posted on Twitter that “Turkey is founded upon a genocide of Greek Christians!” In a string of replies to Turkish users he added that Istanbul was really Constantinople, that Turkey had also committed genocide against the Armenians, and that it was illegally occupying northern Cyprus, northern Syria and Kurdish areas.

The posts were welcomed by many Greeks, Cypriots and Armenians and angered many Turkish users. Below is what he said, why it happened when it did, and the history behind each claim, from the genocide of Ottoman Greeks to the Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus.

What Yair Netanyahu tweeted

The first post carried a graph that, according to reports at the time, showed the growth of the Muslim share of the population of Turkey over the years. His headline sentence was short and blunt:

Turkey is founded upon a genocide of Greek Christians! pic.twitter.com/Iul6ayQqnQ

— Yair Netanyahu 🇮🇱 (@YairNetanyahu) May 13, 2021

Responding to accounts he described as Turkish bots, he went further. He argued that Turks were not native to Anatolia but had arrived from Central Asia, that they had carried out genocide against the local Greek Christian population, and that Istanbul was in truth Constantinople, taken illegally. He also referred to the Armenian genocide.

In a follow-up reply, he accused Turkey of occupying north Cyprus, north Syria and Kurdistan, and described its president as a dictator who wanted to dominate the Arab world as in Ottoman times:

>>to the Armenians. You are currently illegally occupy north Cyprus, north Syria, and Kurdistan. Your country is run by a dictator who wants to re occupy and oppress the Arab world like in the days of the Ottoman Empire.

— Yair Netanyahu 🇮🇱 (@YairNetanyahu) May 13, 2021

A day earlier he had posted a shorter demand: “End the occupation of Kurdistan and North Cyprus!”

The context: the May 2021 Gaza war

The tweets came at a tense moment. Protests over threatened evictions in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem began in early May 2021. On 10 May, Hamas fired rockets at Israel and Israel launched air strikes on Gaza. The fighting lasted until a ceasefire on 21 May. Around 260 Palestinians were killed, about half of them civilians according to UN figures, and at least 13 people were killed in Israel.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was among the most outspoken foreign critics of Israel during the conflict, and relations between the two countries, already poor, sank further. Yair Netanyahu’s posts were a counter-attack aimed at Turkey’s own record.

It is worth being clear about who was speaking. Born in 1991, Yair Netanyahu held no government post. He is a podcaster and political activist known for combative social media posts, some of which have drawn criticism and, in 2018, a temporary Facebook suspension. His tweets were personal statements, not Israeli policy.

The genocide of Ottoman Greeks

The core claim of his first tweet rests on established history. Between roughly 1914 and 1923, Ottoman Greeks in Pontus on the Black Sea coast, Ionia in western Anatolia, Cappadocia and Eastern Thrace were subjected to massacres, death marches, deportations and forced labour. The campaign was carried out first by the Ottoman government of the Committee of Union and Progress and later by the Turkish nationalist forces led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

Estimates of the dead vary widely, from about 300,000 to more than a million, with between 300,000 and 360,000 deaths in Pontus alone. The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey then uprooted the surviving communities: Greece recorded more than 1.1 million arrivals from Turkey, and the exchange barred their return.

In 2007, the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution recognising the campaign against Ottoman Greeks as genocide, alongside those against Armenians and Assyrians. Greece passed laws in 1994 and 1998 marking 19 May as the day of remembrance for the Pontic Greek genocide and 14 September for the Greeks of Asia Minor. Cyprus, Sweden, the Netherlands, Austria, Armenia and others have also recognised it. Yair Netanyahu’s tweets came less than a week before the annual 19 May commemoration.

Constantinople and the Armenian genocide

Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire for over a thousand years, fell to the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II on 29 May 1453 after a 53-day siege. Greeks remained a large community in the city for centuries, and the name Istanbul became official only in 1930. Many Greeks still call the city Konstantinoupoli.

The idea that Turks “came from Central Asia” refers to the migration of Turkic peoples into Anatolia from the 11th century onward. Historians note that the population of modern Turkey also descends in large part from the earlier peoples of Anatolia, many of whom converted and adopted the Turkish language over centuries, so the history is more mixed than a single tweet can show.

The Armenian genocide, in which around a million or more Armenians were killed from 1915, is the best-known of the Ottoman-era atrocities. Just weeks before these tweets, on 24 April 2021, US President Joe Biden formally used the word genocide, following resolutions by both chambers of Congress in 2019. Israel itself had not formally recognised the Armenian genocide in 2021. In August 2025, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a podcast interview with Patrick Bet-David that he recognised the Armenian genocide, making him the first Israeli prime minister to say so; reports said he also referred to the genocides of Greeks and Assyrians. In June 2026 the Israeli government moved to formally recognise the Armenian genocide, a step that still needed the Knesset (NPR). His remarks were a personal statement, not a formal recognition by the Knesset or the Israeli government.

Northern Cyprus, Syria and the Kurds

Turkey invaded Cyprus on 20 July 1974 and, in a second offensive from 14 August, took about 36 per cent of the island. Roughly 150,000 to 200,000 Greek Cypriots were driven from their homes in the north. The UN Security Council called for the withdrawal of foreign troops in Resolution 353, and in 1983 declared the breakaway “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” legally invalid in Resolution 541. Turkey is still the only country that recognises it, and its troops remain on the island today.

In Syria, Turkey has carried out several cross-border operations since 2016 against Islamic State and, mainly, Kurdish forces it regards as terrorists, and it continues to hold areas of northern Syria. “Kurdistan” refers to the wider region where Kurds live across Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria; Kurds have long campaigned for greater rights and self-rule.

Why the tweets struck a chord

For Greeks, Cypriots, Armenians and Assyrians, hearing these histories named plainly by a prominent Israeli voice mattered. Recognition is often slow and political, and denial still shapes official positions in Turkey. A single viral post can bring this history to millions of people who had never heard of the Pontic Greeks.

At the same time, a tweet is not a policy. Yair Netanyahu was using history in the heat of a political fight, and his sharpest lines were aimed at Turkey’s government in the middle of a war. Readers who want to understand the events he named will learn far more from the history itself than from the argument that brought it up: the genocides of Greeks, Armenians and Assyrians, the 1923 exchange, and the 1974 invasion of Cyprus.

Sources: Greek City Times, 13 May 2021; Wikipedia: Greek genocide; Wikipedia: Yair Netanyahu; Wikipedia: 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis; Wikipedia: Armenian genocide recognition; The Times of Israel: In first, Netanyahu says he recognizes Armenian genocide; The Greek Herald, August 2025; Wikipedia: Turkish invasion of Cyprus; Wikipedia: Fall of Constantinople.