I first began to grapple with this issue nearly sixty years ago when the State Department assigned me to the Israel-Jordan desk. As a newly minted Foreign Service officer, I had studied in Sweden and written a Master’s thesis on the 1919 Curzon Line between Poland and Russia. I told my boss, Ambassador Parker Hart, that I knew nothing about the Middle East. “Well,” he gruffly replied, “Maybe that’s what we need around here, a fresh new mind.”

Soon after this exchange I was posted to Jerusalem where I lived for a time in the American Colony, a boutique hotel founded by Horatio Gates Spafford, a well-to-do Chicagoan lawyer who had migrated to the Holy City in 1881. Over the decades, such distinguished visitors as T.E. Lawrence, Lowell Thomas, Gertrude Bell and John D. Rockefeller spent time in the American Colony.