In the past week, not one but two leaders – Turkish and Palestinian – made rare acknowledgements of the suffering of the ‘other.'

On the eve of the 99th anniversary of the deportation and massacre of Armenians under Ottoman rule, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan conveyed the country's "condolences" to the grandchildren of the 600,000 to 1.5 million killed in what many regard as a genocide.

And just as Israel began marking Holocaust Remembrance Day, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called the killing of 6 million Jews "the most heinous crime"  of the modern era and expressed "sympathy with the families of the victims and many other innocent people who were killed by the Nazis."

(READ the story in the CS Monitor)