When the world's at stake,
go beyond the headlines.

Welcome to Mid-Afternoon Map, our exclusive members-only newsletter that provides a cartographic perspective on current events, geopolitics, and history from the Caucasus to the Carolinas. Subscribers can look forward to interesting takes on good maps and bad maps, beautiful maps and ugly ones — and bizarre maps whenever possible.***Turkish history and Twitter are a bad combination. As someone who has undoubtedly wasted too much time on both of them, I should have known better. But reading about the deepening famine in Gaza, I made the mistake of tweeting that Israeli rhetoric on the subject increasingly resembled Turkish defenses of the Armenian genocide: We’re not starving anyone intentionally, and even if we were, they deserve it.A number of Turkish and pro-Israel respondents quickly corrected me. The obvious difference, it turns out, is that unlike the Palestinians/Armenians, the Armenians/Palestinians really did deserve it. They started the conflict, they committed unspeakable acts of violence, and anything they suffered as a result was an inescapable, if regrettable, part of war.Another point where everyone seemed to be in inexplicable agreement was that events in Gaza were either bad, and therefore genocide, or not genocide, and therefore totally fine. Turkish commentators insisted that criticizing Israel’s actions without calling them genocide was meaningless. Pro-Israel commentators insisted that if genocidal intent was absent, there was nothing to worry about. Seemingly lost in the back and forth was the possibility that starving a million people, while distinctly less horrific than killing a million people, is still undeniably horrific.Author’s photo, Jerusalem, 2018.Turkish, Israeli, and Armenian history has long been intertwined. Jerusalem became home to many Armenian genocide survivors, while the modern state of Israel was often hesitant to acknowledge the genocide for fear of provoking Turkey. And even after Turkish-Israeli relations turned hostile, in 2023 the two countries both supported Azerbaijan in driving Armenians out of Nagorno-Karabakh. The result was an all-too-rare