Like many of you, I'm sure, I've been watching Congress' waffling over the issue of whether or not formally to label the murder of 1.5 million Armenians during the First World War an act of genocide or not.

On the one hand, there does not seem to be any serious question whether or not the Turks, through various policies implemented during the final years of the war, were directly responsible for the deaths of up to 1,500,000 Armenians. Hundreds of thousands of people were murdered outright, often in actions that are reminiscent of the way the killing squads in the Ukraine murdered similar numbers of Jews during the Second World War. Massive numbers of others were forced from their homes and deported, which generally meant being sent on death marches through the desert which none, or almost none, survived. When I was in college, I read Franz Werfel's great novel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which made a great impression on me. (My father had read it when it first came out in the 1930s and recommended it to me when he first took note of my interest in the Shoah. I wasn't disappointed. It's an exceptional book, one well worth reading even today.) And no one, other than the Turks themselves, seems inclined to dismiss this as mere exaggeration or calumny. Indeed, no fewer than fifty-three Nobel laureates earlier this year signed a letter sponsored by the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity in which they unequivocally agreed with the conclusion that the atrocities directed against the Armenians constituted an concerted attempt to annihilate a people, which is precisely the definition of genocide.

That the Armenians want the massacres accurately to be labeled as attempted genocide is also pretty resonant with me. Look at the way we all responded when the president of Iran openly insulted the memory of our martyrs by questioning the historicity of the Shoah! Just this morning, in fact, I read a news story about a fight looming at Oxford University over whether the well-known Holocaust denier, David Irving, should be invited to speak about his views. And I don't have any problem knowing where I stand on that! Nor, I'm sure, does any of us.

On the other hand, I see the counterargument. Turkey is an important ally of ours, especially now that we are in Iraq. Moreover, Turkey has maintained diplomatic relations with Israel for decades and is, by far, Israel's best friend in the Muslim world. Even irritating, let alone enraging, a nation that plays such a pivotal role in issues of such paramount concern to us hardly seems like a good idea. Still, the president's comment yesterday to the effect that the genocide issue is a part of Ottoman history that does not need to be debated or discussed at this particular moment when it risks to anger people we need to be our friends, rings wholly false to me...just as would the argument that we shouldn't bother deporting Nazi war criminals because the Shoah was just the implementation of a policy that held sway in the political life of a version of the German state that hasn't existed for more than sixty years, and, after all, the Germans today are such an important ally and trading partner!

It's easy to dismiss the suffering of others. Armenian and Turk, Tutsi and Hutu, Jangaweed and Darfuri-how simple is it to turn the page and say, quietly (but never quite quietly enough), "Sorry, not my holocaust!" But to be drawn into some sort of ghoulish sweepstakes of misery in which the winners gets to call their disaster a true act of genocide-this cannot be a game reasonable people can ever want to play. Nor can it ever be in the best interests of Jewish people to encourage people to forget, or, worse, not even to learn, the lessons of history, to look away from horror-from Treblinka, but also from Nanking or the Cambodian killing fields, or from Darfur-or to use the suffering of innocents as a political football.

The right step forward, I believe, would not be to take sides at all, but to help facilitate a rapprochement between erstwhile enemies. If the Turks want to make their case that what happened was not genocide, then they should be encouraged to do so...not by bullying the world or issuing threats, but in the old-fashioned way: by publishing reasoned, thoughtful books of well-documented history, by developing arguments that can be debated by scholars and historians, and by opening up their own archives to show what light the documents stored there can shed on the larger issue. And, then...and this is the hard part...if the world remains unconvinced, then by reconsidering their prior stance and, if necessary, attempting to reconcile with the Armenians, and to own up to past errors and past crimes. Our country has the influence to urge along a process of national soul-searching on that level...and it is what we should do. Just passing bills in Congress that enflame the situation without really leading anywhere is neither useful nor, really, helpful. There is a better way...and it leads through the facilitation of thoughtful communication between warring parties to the establishment of the kind of dignified peace between nations that is more than just a stand-off, but which constitutes a just and real resolution of a bitter dispute.

Sincerely,

Rabbi Martin S. Cohen