We so often take one side or the other and are blind to the desires of the other side. But are there not common interests also? On the Palestine side, hatred of Jews so often takes precedence over the modernization that peace could bring to them and has been offered to them by liberal Israelis who have valued peace and still value peace. On the Israel side, there are far right extremists who falsely believe they are performing some prophecy that justifies their grabbing all the Land of Israel/Palestine instead of sharing it. Also, there are the personal interests of some leaders on both sides. Netanyahu, an unpopular prime minister of Israel, has a personal interest in prolonging the war because peace will expose him to scrutiny for his past misdeeds. The Palestinian top leaders of Hamas sit in luxury in Gulf states, personally away from the fray, while their underlings die doing the dirty work. UNRWA depends for its existence on perpetual refugee status of Palestinian Arabs. Theodore Herzl, a secular Jew, was naïve in expecting that the local Arabs would welcome the modernization that Jewish immigration would bring, but perhaps that kind of secular naivety is what is needed to bring peace to the land.