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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