Israel – the home to the people who saw six million of their own exterminated by the Nazis – still does not officially recognize the Armenian Genocide. It is time for this to change, the Jerusalem Post said in an editorial.

According to the piece, Israel, just like the United States, has for many years feared Turkish retaliation if it were to recognize historical facts.

In 2018, Meretz MK Tamar Zandberg proposed a bill to recognize the massacre as genocide, but the bill was canceled due to government resistance. A year later, a number of high-profile members of Knesset like Yair Lapid and Gideon Sa’ar voiced support for the move, but again it did not proceed due to little government support.

Traditionally, the explanations for Israel’s failure to move on this have ranged from a need to leave a door open to better ties with Turkey to a clear government agenda that prefers Azerbaijan over Armenia. This was made clear this past fall, when Israel supplied weapons to Azerbaijan as it unleashed a war against the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh.

"One, though, does not have to come at the expense of the other. Yes, Israel has geopolitical considerations and those cannot be ignored, but it also has a moral imperative that it cannot simply brush off. As a people who have experienced genocide and persecution since its founding, the Jews have a responsibility to stand with other nations who go through similar atrocities," the editorial reads.

When we recite “Never Again” on Holocaust Remembrance Day, it is obviously “never again” for our people, but there is nothing wrong with making it clear that we also believe that genocide should never happen to anyone else as well. The first step in ensuring “never again” is recognizing history as it was and making clear that what happened to the Armenians was in fact a genocide.