The words “Never again” have long echoed as a solemn promise after the horrors of the Holocaust. Yet, we will soon approach the next International Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January 2026, this phrase rings hollow when set against the grim reality unfolding in Gaza.
Since October 2023, over 60,000 people—many of them women and children—have been killed in Gaza, according to international agencies. Entire families have been erased, neighbourhoods reduced to rubble, and hunger used as a weapon. This is not a war of defence. It is the systematic destruction of a people. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has used the word many hesitate to say: genocide.
Omer Bartov, a Holocaust and genocide scholar at Brown University and former Israeli soldier, recently drew attention to a chilling parallel. After World War II, Allied forces compelled German civilians to walk through the concentration camps of Buchenwald, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen. They were forced to see what they had ignored.
Today, supporters of the Israeli government’s policies should be made to witness the devastation in Gaza—the starving children, the mutilated bodies, the cries of the innocent—because, as in 1945, turning away is not an excuse.
Yes, Israel has a right to exist, and yes, its people deserve security. But the current government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu and supported by ultra-Orthodox political factions, is steering the nation toward moral collapse. Its actions betray the very democratic ideals it claims to uphold. It silences dissent, flouts international law, and erodes its own credibility by rejecting legal norms established after 1945 to prevent precisely such atrocities.
Even within Israel, voices of conscience have long sounded the alarm. Philosopher, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, warned of settlers in occupied territories behaving like their former oppressors. Novelist, David Grossman, reflecting in May this year, declared: “In the face of so much suffering, the fact that Hamas started this crisis on October 7 is irrelevant.” That suffering, he reminds us, is what must matter most.
Here in Hong Kong, we are not mere spectators. Oblate Father John Wotherspoon, a missionary long known for his advocacy for justice and compassion, has walked to the Consulate General of Israel in Hong Kong six times in recent months to express his protest—each step a plea for conscience, each visit a reminder that faith must speak up when others remain silent.
We must not deceive ourselves into thinking this crisis is distant or unrelated to us. When we grow numb, when we look away, we allow human beings to be reduced to numbers. But as Catholics, we are called to uphold the dignity of every person, whether Israeli or Palestinian, Christian, Muslim, or Jew.
If we truly mean “Never again,” then we must mean never again—for anyone.
As the day to remember the Holocaust comes again, may our remembrance not be empty. Let it be an urgent call to protect life, resist injustice, and uphold the sanctity of every human being—especially those crying out for help now. jose, CMF
