‘Never Again’ Will Soon Mean Nothing – Unless Israel Recovers Her Memory
Each law of the Old Testament is a statute that lives up to the etymological root that word shares with statue. God’s laws are sacred memory carved into stone and sculpted into moral obligation. They leap off the page with the moral and personal force that only intimate history can produce. “Remember that you were a slave in Egypt,” and therefore “you shall not pervert justice due the stranger or orphan.” (Deut. 24:17–18)
The Torah weds morality to memory. Justice is not a detached ideal – it is rooted in the experience of suffering and becomes incarnate as if resulting from a wound.
But for the modern State of Israel, the defining trauma isn’t Egypt. It’s the Shoah. The Holocaust engraved the phrase never again into modern Jewish memory. When unmoored from justice, however, memory can become a weapon. And when it is selectively applied, it stops being moral and begins to be merely political.
And here lies a bitter truth: the refusal to name and repent of the Armenian Genocide has not only let that catastrophe slip from memory – it has created a precedent. A template. A silence loud enough to echo through to the present.
A Forgotten Genocide
In 1915, the Ottoman Empire slaughtered 1.5 million Armenian Christians. Families were gunned down. Children kidnapped. Churches desecrated. A Christian civilization was wiped from its homeland.
To this day, Turkey denies it. And tragically, so does the modern State of Israel.
Why? For years, Turkey has been a strategic ally to Israel. Realpolitik eclipsed righteousness. Victims were sacrificed on the altar of military and economic cooperation.
But the disappearance of a genocide from Israel’s memory wasn’t just a diplomatic failure. It was a moral disarmament.
Silence, like darkness, creates opportunity for violence.
Today, the silence continues in the Holy Land. Armenian churches and properties in Jerusalem and Israel are being encroached upon, seized, and desecrated – often under cover of state indifference or tacit approval. The 1,500-year-old Armenian Quarter in Jerusalem faces an existential threat from settler movements and developers. Armenian clergy have been physically attacked in the streets of the Holy City.
The silence is so great that many readers likely will not even have heard that in Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), a second Armenian ethnic cleansing has unfolded in recent years.
With Turkey’s full support, Azerbaijan ethnically cleansed over 100,000 Armenian Christians in 2023, forcing them from land their ancestors had inhabited for millennia.
Israel armed Azerbaijan.
The pattern continues.
The Road to Gaza
The refusal to name the Armenian genocide dulled the conscience of a nation forged in genocide. It sent a message: some genocides don’t count. Some lives are negotiable.
And now, that same nation stands accused of genocide in Gaza.
Whether one accepts or rejects the term, the charge is no longer anything like unthinkable. That fact alone is a measure of moral erosion.
And the significance – moral and rooted in memory – is too important to be missed by anyone who claims to revere the God of the Old Testament and the New: Israel denied genocide – and now stands accused of committing it.
It isn’t just tragic – it’s prophetic. Adolf Hitler, just before launching his campaign of extermination, reportedly reassured his generals: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Genocide denied becomes genocide rehearsed. Unpunished evil does not disappear. It metastasizes.
Netanyahu’s Shrug and Erdoğan’s Fury
In August, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was asked by podcaster Patrick Bet-David why Israel hadn’t recognized the Armenian genocide. Netanyahu replied: “I think we have… I just did.”
But he hadn’t. No Israeli law, no state resolution, no national day of mourning. His remark was a politically necessary soundbite given in response to a question that cornered him into a forced response – and so he offered a handwave and a shrug – not repentance.
Nonetheless, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s regime in Turkey condemned the statement within hours – not because mentioning an Armenian genocide was false, but because it was true. In fact, Erdoğan, an architect of regional instability, may have done more to acknowledge Armenia’s genocide than Netanyahu had: the Turkish president blasted Netanyahu for trying to “exploit past tragedies” while “committing genocide in Gaza.”
It was cynicism. But even cynical truth is still truth.
When Prophets are Ignored
Israel is not without moral voices. In 2000, Education Minister Yossi Sarid tried to include the Armenian genocide in national school curricula. In 2016, a Knesset committee recognized it. But the government never made it law.
No one was willing to tie memory to morality.
And in that failure, Israel has forgotten her own story.
The people of God in the Old Testament often forgot Egypt and needed to be called to remember. To repent. To suffer again – if only in the pangs of compassion for “the stranger and the orphan.”
Today, the state of Israel has forgotten Auschwitz. Forgotten the orphans, widows, and strangers whose lives once taught her how to love justice.
As Mihran Kalaydjian wrote this week in the Times of Israel: “A nation that demands global recognition of Jewish suffering cannot indefinitely withhold recognition of Armenian suffering without undermining its own credibility.”
I would add: it cannot do so without losing its soul.
As a Catholic, I Must Say This
As a Catholic, I see the Church as the Body of Christ – and Christ as the true Israel. Jesus Christ is the Temple not made by hands, and in Him, the call to justice extends to every victim of violence and every act of cruelty.
The Armenian Christians of 1915 – and the Armenians of Artsakh too. The hostages starving in the darkness of a Hamas tunnel – and the Christians of Gaza, together with the Muslim children buried under rubble.
To deny their suffering is to deny the Christ who said in the Temple: “Before Abraham was, I Am.” (John 8:58) He Himself made our obligation to the downtrodden as clear as He made Himself in the statutes of the Old Testament – and clearer still: “What you do to the least of these, you do to Me.”
The Final Plea
“You shall remember that you were a slave…” (Deut. 5:15)
Memory is not just a past-tense command. It is present-tense moral clarity.
The modern state of Israel must remember. It must name the Armenian genocide – not as a diplomatic gesture, but as a national act of repentance. It must confront the ethnic cleansing of Artsakh. It must look to Gaza not as a battlefield to dominate, but as a reckoning with its own moral failure.
Because the genocide Israel denied is the one now haunting her borders.
And the only path forward is to remember.
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