Now that we have celebrated Yom Haatzma'ut, it is worth stating a truth that much of the West still does not understand: the greatest memorial to the Holocaust is not found in stone, glass, or ceremony. It is the sovereign State of Israel.
Museums matter. Memorials matter. Testimony matters. But none of them can stop a pogrom, intercept a missile, rescue hostages, or defeat an army sworn to destroy the Jewish people. Israel can. That is why Jewish independence is not merely a political achievement. It is the living answer to Jewish powerlessness.
This is also why so many in the West fundamentally misread Israel. They assume the conflict is mainly about borders, settlements, “occupation," or competing national narratives. Those on our side imagine that with enough diplomacy, enough concessions, and enough hasbara, the hostility will subside and the Jewish state will finally be accepted.
But that is not the issue. Israel is not fighting a public-relations war. It is fighting for its existence against enemies who do not object merely to what Israel does, but to what Israel is: a sovereign Jewish state in the heart of the Muslim world, capable of defending Jews and refusing to die quietly.
When Jews say “Never Again," they are not reciting a line for memorial ceremonies. They are making a declaration of policy. “Never Again" means Jews will no longer entrust their fate to the goodwill of others. It means they will no longer depend on foreign rulers, international bodies, or elegant statements of sympathy issued after massacres. It means the Jewish people will have the power to fight back.
That is the real significance of Israel. It is not only a refuge after catastrophe. It is the instrument designed to prevent catastrophe from recurring.
Today, that lesson should be obvious. Israel is confronting a ring of fire built by Iran-the head of the octopus-through Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, militias in Iraq and Syria, and other proxies. This is not a misunderstanding. It is not a messaging failure. It is a coordinated campaign of encirclement and attrition directed at a single goal: the weakening, isolation, and, if possible, destruction of the Jewish state.
There are still people who believe that if Israel simply explained itself better, the world would understand why it fights so hard. Some would. Many would not. The hard truth is that many of Israel’s critics understand perfectly well what is at stake and oppose Israel anyway. They do not want Jewish strength to succeed. They preferred the Jew as victim, not the Jew as sovereign. Dead Jews are mourned. Armed Jews are condemned.
That is why hasbara, while useful at the margins, cannot be mistaken for strategy. One does not persuade a genocidal enemy to abandon his aims by refining one’s talking points. A civilization that watched October 7 and still rushed to morally equate murderers with their victims is not suffering from lack of information. It is suffering from moral collapse.
Israel exists precisely because Jews learned, at unbearable cost, that eloquence without power is fragile, and law without force is often meaningless.
This is also why the question of Judea and Samaria cannot be reduced to the sterile vocabulary of diplomats and editorial boards. The Jews have a legal, moral, and historical right to live in all parts of the land of Israel, including Judea and Samaria. The Mandate for Palestine conferred on the Jewish people the right to settle anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and that legal entitlement has never been extinguished in international law.
Despite this, there are those who persist in calling Judea and Samaria “occupied Palestinian Arab land." Eugene Kontorovich, an Israeli legal scholar specializing in constitutional and international law, has thoroughly explained why this claim is false. Occupation, under international law, occurs when one state takes the sovereign territory of another. But Judea and Samaria were never the sovereign territory of an Arab Palestinian state. Jordan seized it in 1949 and ethnically cleansed its Jewish population. Nor can a state occupy territory to which it has a sovereign claim. Israel, as the successor state to the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, possesses the strongest legal claim.
What is rarely mentioned is even more important. As former U.S. Ambassador David Friedman notes in One Jewish State: The Last, Best Hope to Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Judea and Samaria are the heart of Biblical Israel, “where the ancient kings of Israel ruled, and the prophets preached. This is where Jewish history was forged, where Jewish ethics were shaped, and where the Jewish people first became a nation."
To speak of Jews as foreign interlopers in Hebron, Shiloh, Beit El, or Jerusalem is not merely inaccurate. It is absurd.
William G. Dever, the distinguished American archaeologist and biblical scholar, has observed that archaeological discoveries have repeatedly confirmed a continuous Jewish presence in the land from the period of Joshua bin-Nun to the Arab conquest in the seventh century. Norman Bentwich, the first attorney general of Mandatory Palestine, wrote: “Wherever you plant your foot in that land, you tread on history."
And that history is precisely what Israel’s enemies seek to erase.
Naomi Kahn of Regavim has described the Palestinian Authority’s systematic effort to blur and eventually sever the Jewish connection to the land of Israel. Because Judea and Samaria are the cradle of Jewish history, they are the natural focal point of this campaign. Historical revisionism is not a side issue. It is a strategic weapon. If Jewish roots can be denied, then Jewish rights can be denied. If Jewish history can be recast as colonial intrusion, then Jewish self-defense can be portrayed as aggression.
This is why the conflict cannot be honestly understood as a conventional territorial dispute. It is also a civilizational and religious struggle over whether Jewish history, Jewish sovereignty, and Jewish permanence will be tolerated in the very land from which the Jews emerged.
As historian Mordechai Kedar has argued, the religious dimension is indispensable to understanding the depth of the rejection. For many of Israel’s enemies, the existence of a Jewish state-any Jewish state, in any borders-is intolerable. The offense is not what Israel has done, but that Jews have returned as pioneers to reclaim their ancestral home and not as history’s victims.
David Ben-Gurion understood the magnitude of this return. He knew of “no other people that was exiled from its land and dispersed among the nations of the world to be hated, persecuted, expelled, and slaughtered…that did not vanish from history, did not despair or assimilate… but yearned incessantly to return to its land, believing for two thousand years in its messianic deliverance-and that indeed did return and… renew its independence."
That renewal is what Yom Haatzma'ut celebrates.
The Holocaust taught the Jews what happens when hatred meets Jewish helplessness. Israel was built to ensure that helplessness would end. It is the embodiment of Jewish memory translated into Jewish responsibility. It is what “Never Again" looks like when a people decides that survival must depend not on pity, but on power.
So yes, museums will continue to preserve the ashes. They should.
But Israel preserves the future.
And that is why the greatest memorial to the Holocaust is not a museum.
It is the Jewish state.
Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He has an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.