Having written Camp David as a drama, I could see the drama maybe a little more clearly when I wrote the book.

Journalism is a flawed profession, but it has a self-correcting mechanism. The rule of journalism is: talk to everybody.

I feel like a 1960s graduate student. I still work on note cards. I've never found a better system.

It's the hardening of these narratives that makes peace so difficult. If each side can see the narrative, the claims that the other has, then there is a much more likely possibility of making a resolution. But what I see is the opposite. There is a total disclaiming of the validity of the other side, and talk that I find really unsettling, the kind of chatter you get from ultra-right Israelis and Hamas is of annihilation. In that kind of dialogue, there's no way to move toward peace.

It's funny how sometimes historians sneer at journalists, yet they depend on us in the future for the material that they mine. You realize that some of the stories wouldn't have been told if you hadn't gotten to them. There is that sense of capturing a moment that was just about to go over the horizon.

It's easy enough to predict that there will be conflict, but you place yourself in a maelstrom when you offer a view about the conflict, and I don't have an investment in one side or the other; I feel compassion for both sides. I've spent a fair amount of time in Gaza and Israel, done a lot of reporting and lived over there, and the tragedy is sometimes overwhelming. At the same time, America does have an investment in what happens.

To me the notion that Palestinians are actually Jews is, I think, quite revelatory and very radical and a possible bridge that has been ignored, I think, in this entire controversy and there's ample evidence to support it.