A Stimulus Plan for Middle East Peace?

It's time for a multi-billion dollar stimulus plan for peace, Lenore G. Martin writes on the new and improved Israel Policy Forum website:

By all accounts, Israeli settlements block the implementation of a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. The stimulus package should consist of a multi-billion dollar international fund with a first priority of reversing the growth of Israeli settlements and financing the resettlement of Israelis from the West Bank essentially within the 1967 borders. The next application of the fund will be to house Palestinians in the vacant Israeli settlements. The ultimate goal of the stimulus package will be the creation of an economically viable Palestinian state.

If only the settlements were the sole impediment to peace, as Martin states, then this might work. But we would still have that little matter of the Palestinian civil war to worry about. And one other thing -- I've never been sure why we should pay for the removal of settlers. As Dov Zakheim, the former Defense Department official, Orthodox Jew, and non-neo-con conservative, famously said when asked whether the U.S. should help pay for the relocation of the settlers: "We should pay for their mishegoss?"