Mention history, and it can trigger a roll of the eyes.
Add the Middle East to the equation, and folks might start running for the hills, unwilling to get caught up in the seemingly bottomless pit of details and disputes.
But without an understanding of what happened in the past, it's impossible to grasp where we are today. And where we are has profound relevance for the region and the world.
Fifty-one years ago this week, the Six-Day War broke out.
While some wars fade into obscurity, this one remains as relevant today as in 1967. Many of its core issues remain unresolved.
Politicians, diplomats, and journalists continue to grapple with the consequences of that war, but rarely consider, or perhaps are even unaware of the context. Yet without context, some critically important things may not make sense.
First, in June 1967, there was no state of Palestine. It didn't exist and never had. Its creation, proposed by the UN in 1947, was rejected by the Arab world because it also meant the establishment of a Jewish state alongside it.
Second, the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem were in Jordanian hands. Violating solemn agreements, Jordan denied Jews access to their holiest places in eastern Jerusalem. To make matters still worse, they desecrated and destroyed many of those sites.
Meanwhile, the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian control, with harsh military rule imposed on local residents. And the Golan Heights, which were regularly used to shell Israeli communities far below, belonged to Syria.
Third, the Arab world could have created a Palestinian state in the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip any day of the week. They didn't. There wasn't even a discussion about it. And Arab leaders, who today profess such attachment to eastern Jerusalem, rarely if ever visited it. It was viewed as an Arab backwater.
Fourth, the 1967 boundary at the time of the war, so much in the news these days, was nothing more than an armistice line dating back to 1949 - familiarly known as the Green Line. That boundary was established after five Arab armies attacked Israel in 1948 with the aim of destroying the embryonic Jewish state. They failed.
Armistice lines were drawn after that war, but they weren't formal borders. They couldn't be. The Arab world, even in defeat, refused to recognize Israel's very right to exist.