The basic problem with the Middle East is that it is fifteen pounds in a five pound bag. There’s no way to divide the territory into nations in a way that will satisfy everyone.
Rather than try to shoehorn warring ideologies into overlapping jurisdictions, why not move everyone out? The Palestinians get a chunk of Texas. The Jews get southern Florida, except for the very Caribbean and Latin-influenced coastal areas like Miami and Tampa. Details can be worked out.
No one will live in the so-called Holy Land. It becomes a religious theme park operated by a staff of sympathetic non-believers. Everything will be carefully maintained and preserved. The various religions can come in to observe their various festivals, but no one with a religious stake gets to stay over. People will have to get along whenever the needs of the various faiths coincide, but it will be a lot easier than trying to reconcile resident populations.
Palestinians and Jews, now separated by a thousand miles or so, can decide whether it’s worth making the long trip to pick on each other. And since they’ll be embedded in the United States it will be easier to keep tabs on the malcontents.
No doubt some form of this idea has been proposed. I read somewhere that Argentina was once considered as a site for a Jewish homeland. Then we would just have to deal with displaced gauchos.
People who derive their self esteem from unswerving compliance with unverifiable superstition will always be hard to accommodate, because so many of them are unwilling to accommodate anyone else. That leaves it to the rest of us to decide how we might be able to get along with them.
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