It is the conventional wisdom that the Israeli/Palestinian dispute lies at the heart of all the problems the world has with Islam and terrorism today. But it has been pointed out to us that human beings have a natural inclination, when attacked by an enemy, to try to understand what happened—to evaluate the motives of the enemy in the light of our own experience and our own culture. It is entirely possible that our response to 9/11 was just in that vein, and possibly mistaken because of it.

It is also the conventional wisdom that the Middle East crisis is about land. I did a program some time ago asking who owns the land down there—what people hold title to it. I have since come to realize that doesn’t matter. The Middle East crisis is not about land. And I have also come to see that all of the well-intentioned peace process was fated to failure from the start.

The reason is simple. Peace was not the objective of the Palestinian people. Note well, I said Palestinian people, not the Palestinian Authority. So if land and peace are not the objective, what is?