Obama's Cairo speech: Superficial thinking

Douglas Feith:

"But if the president actually does understand the problems of Islam and the West, he would not have said some of the things in his speech. He would not have suggested that the Arab-Israeli conflict is fundamentally about Israeli West Bank settlements or about Israel's denial of the Palestinians' 'legitimate aspirations' for a state of their own in the West Bank and Gaza.

The notion that Arab objections to the Jewish state are focused narrowly on the territories the Arabs lost to Israel in 1967 is ahistorical in a way that should be obvious: The conflict predated the 1967 war, or there would not have been a 1967 war, let alone the Arab-Israeli War of 1948-49. "