Archbishop Nourhan Manougian, the Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem, wrote—in a missive read at a conference in Jerusalem—that he cannot understand Israel’s ongoing refusal to recognize the Turkish massacre of 1.5 million Armenians as genocide, The Jerusalem Post reports. 

The Armenian patriarch reasoned that if the United States has recognized the massacre, Israel should as well.

Manougian’s message was read at the Hebrew University, where Prof. Michael Stone, the founder of the Armenian Studies program at the university’s Institute of Asian and African Studies, annually conducts a symposium and commemoration of the Armenian genocide.

In his message to Israeli Armenians and Jews at the event, Archbishop Nourhan Manougian wrote: “For 98 years, so many efforts have been invested in getting the Turks to admit that they committed genocide and the Turks continue to deny.”

At the start of his message, the archbishop quoted Napoleon Bonaparte as saying, “The world suffers not because of the violence of bad people but because of the silence of good people.”