Noting that "the literature on the Armenian Genocide is quite extensive and growing" with works having been published on the 1894-1896 massacres, origins of the 1915–1923 genocide, the role of the great powers, memories of the survivors, the post-WWI Armenian Republic, the parallels to the Shoah, and the denial by the Turkish government and its advocates, Melson remarks that these four books shift the focus to "the role of the bystander," in particular the US, but also the yishuv and the state of Israel.
In fact, Yair Auron's latest book, unlike his earlier work, is not about the yishuv's reactions to the genocide but about the role of the memory of the genocide in Israeli society and state policy. Thus, it seems to me the odd man out in this review, as it is the one book that does not deal at all with the response of contemporaries to the actual events of the genocide but only with issues of memory and recognition in the post-1948 history of the country. A significant part of Balakian's book, too, however is devoted to the post-war aftermath of the Armenian genocide in American politics.
The category of the "bystander" has long been recognized in the historiography on the Shoah. As Saul Friedlander has observed, since its beginnings, the field has been dominated by a basic division into histories of perpetrators, bystanders, and victims (see Friedlander, "The Holocaust," Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, p 412). In recent years, the categories of perpetrator and bystander have increasingly coalesced - perhaps Jan Gross's Neighbors, on the massacre of the Jews of Jedwabne by Poles from the town, is a good example of that.
A fair amount of debate has also taken place on a very different kind of bystander than the one to which Melson and the authors above refer. Scholars have examined Allied, and, particularly American, inaction in the face of reports from Europe. (It is interesting to note in this context that the two figures most persistent in urging the US to stop both genocides were Henry Morgenthau, Sr., the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during WWI, and his son, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury during WWII). In fact, the debate on America's "failure to bomb Auschwitz" is still not over - a number of prominent Holocaust and military historians have sought to contextualize and explain the US's reluctance to bomb the trains and camps (see Edward T. Linenthal's discussion of the debate in Preserving Memory, pp.220-223).
Auron's and Balkian's works are the most critical of their subjects. Their works have a moral, prophetic function in the present - alerting us to our responsibilities to shake off indifference about the fates of others. However, we ought to be wary of those who would seek to take the argument even further by coalescing the categories of perpetrator and bystander too much. It is important to criticize America and Israel (as well as many other states) for failing to recognize the Armenian genocide; it is, however, dishonest to make them as complicit in it as the actual perpetrators. America, and certainly not the tiny yishuv in Palestine, cannot even be compared to the "bystanders" who assisted the Nazis in deporting European Jewish communities or those who beat, raped, killed, and expropriated deported Armenians.
The most important question raised by these works is not one of moral complicity but of moral endurance. As Melson asks in his conclusion,
How can the United States, Israel, and the rest of the world community ever hope to prevent genocidal mass-murder in the future and to bring perpetrators to justice, when they do not even have the moral fiber to affirm the facts of the Armenian Genocide, a crime under international law, that occurred over ninety years ago?
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