Author Kai Bird was wrong about peace in the Middle East
Author Kai Bird was wrong about peace in the Middle East
Every week on “Make Me Smart” we ask an expert, celebrity, author or other prominent figure: “What’s something you thought you knew but later found out you were wrong about?” It’s called the Make Me Smart question.
Kai Bird spent a large part of his adolescence in the Middle East. After many decades, the Pulitzer Prize winner and author of “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” expected that by now there would be a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Unfortunately, he was proven wrong.
As a young expatriate American growing up in the Middle East, I witnessed all the region’s terrible wars, the 1956 Suez war, the 1967 June war, the Jordanian civil war of 1970, the September 1970 hijackings, the October 1973 war. But I truly thought that by the time I was in my 70s, well, surely there would be peace. And surely there would be a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum. I guess I was mistaken.
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