A long time ago, I had figured out what I thought was a pretty decent peace plan for the Middle East. The way I figured it, your average Israeli and average Palestinian doesn't really care about anything other than making peace and being left alone. They might not like each other or want to have anything much to deal with each other, but, basically, the average Israeli and Palestinian just wanted to live in peace and, well, feel free to live.

Unfortunately, on the fringes of each society are the extremists. These are the Palestinians who want to push the Israeli's back to the sea and think that blowing yourself up on a bus and killing tens of people is a sure fire way of getting into heaven. On the other side are the Jews who think that just because the Jews had a piece of land over 2,000 years ago and supposedly some higher being promised it to them several thousands years before that gave them a right to do whatever they please.

What both sides really wanted to do, or at least what they're extremism led them to want to do, is to basically kill each other. The extremist Palestinians just wanted to kill Jews in Mohammed's name and the Jews wanted to kill the Palestinians in G-d's name. Because this is what God (the same God, by the way) wants. And there's nothing God loves more, I'm sure, than people killing other people in His name.

So, my proposal was to take an arid stretch in the desert, some place pretty far away from most of civilization fence it off, and let them at it- give each side all the guns and explosives they wanted and let them do what they really want to do. This way, the extremists would all kill each other and wouldn't be around to mess things up for all the others. Everyone's happy. The extremists get martyrdom and all the normal, average people are left alone to do what they want without the extremists messing them up. The two sides then would get together, and with nobody bothering them about any sort of mucky muck about biblical edicts, Talmudic interpretations, or quotes from the Qu'ran, and, viola- peace. And they'd all live happily ever after.

Now, I'm not even sure that'll work. Sigh.