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I asked a Martian sociologist what he thought of President Obama's Cairo speech. He praised it extravagantly; Martians always start with compliments. Then he mentioned reservations.

"President Obama said little about why he went to Cairo to give that speech instead of to Chicago. And he ignored Palestinian drinking water."

When he saw my double-take at his reference to drinking water, he explained that it must be some special poison in the Palestinian drinking water that makes them more unreasonable than, say, Mexicans. He saw my puzzled expression. "Mexico has a better claim to New Mexico, California, Arizona, and Texas than the Palestinians have to the West Bank, Gaza, or the state of Israel itself. Why don't Mexicans launch an intifada to wrest them from the United States? Why don't Mexican terrorists swim across the Rio Grande and blow themselves up in the streets of San Diego or Tucson? The Mexican population must have safer drinking water."

I expressed skepticism. He went on to give reasons why it had to be a problem with the drinking water that could account for the difference between Mexican and Palestinian behavior.

The ancestors of the Anglos who colonized New Mexico, California, Arizona, and Texas were interlopers; the Spaniards and the indigenous Indian ancestors of contemporary Mexicans lived in the Southwest long before American colonization. The Israelis have a historic connection to Israel or even to the West Bank for more than 2,000 years.

The United States took by military force the land out of which those four states were carved, whereas the land that the Israelis occupy today was given them by international bodies, first by the League of Nations in 1922, then by the United Nations General Assembly in 1947.

When the Israelis moved out of Gaza, they left behind -- without receiving any compensation -- valuable property like greenhouses that generated millions of dollars for flowers and vegetables in the world market. Instead of using those businesses to improve their standard of living, the Palestinian residents destroyed everything that had belonged to Israelis: homes, greenhouses, factories.

Yes, I conceded, but the Palestinians are angry about settlements. "Settlements!" he snorted. "Mexicans buy condominiums in Miami and Americans buy winter homes in Mexico. Nobody calls them settlements. Troops are not needed to give these foreigners special protection. If the Palestinians did not want Israelis to buy land outside of the boundaries of the Israel of 1948, they should have persuaded the neighboring Arab states -- Egypt, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco -- not to kick their 800,000 Jews out." All that may be true, I admitted, but Israel is a Jewish state. The Palestinians living there feel like second-class citizens. Another Martian snort. "So what? Israel is the only Jewish state surrounded by many Arab states. Show me a mid-Eastern Arab state where Jews are permitted to live peacefully, conduct business, enjoy welfare services, and get elected to public office. Aren't Palestinian Arabs members of the Knesset?"

Yes, it is true, I admitted.

"Something in the drinking water makes Palestinians irrational, I think," he said. "They sit around in refugee camps existing on handouts from the United Nations waiting for Israel to collapse. And if that happened, they would rush in and destroy more greenhouses. President Obama ignored the underlying problem: Palestinian drinking water."

Jackson Toby, professor of sociology emeritus at Rutgers University, has been explaining the causes of school violence in American schools and colleges to Martian sociologists for decades; Martians hope to learn how to combat violence in their public schools. Nonetheless, Professor Toby does not expect that his forthcoming book, "The Lowering of Higher Education in America: Why Student Loans Should Be Based on Student Performance," which will be published in November by Praeger Publishers, will interest them; like Americans, Martians don't care what their children learn in their public schools as long as they don't assault one another.