This seems to be the day for mainstream media emissions that you just can’t believe. From the New York Times: The Day After Peace: Designing Palestine. (Hat tip: ted.)

His high-speed railway would run for 70 miles along the West Bank ridges, linking Jenin in the north with Hebron in the south. The railway would then slip like a fishhook through the Negev desert to attach the West Bank to the Gaza Strip, running 130 miles in all and establishing the connection between the two territories that development officials consider essential to a Palestinian economy. Alongside the railway, Mr. Suisman proposes stretching a water conduit, a trench for fiber-optic cable, power lines, a toll road and a strip of parkland.

He would site the train stations at a distance from existing city centers, connecting each pairing with other public transportation. The idea was to create new frames for housing and businesses, to accommodate the expanding population while preserving open space. He compares his crosshatched line to an embryo’s backbone and, inevitably, an olive branch.

The Rand studies were prompted by California-based donors hoping to see an end to the conflict. Carol and David Richards, financed the detailed study of the viability of a Palestinian state. Mr. Richards said he acted after Mr. Bush came out in favor of a two-state solution.

“I’m a supporter of Israel, but I think their occupation of the West Bank is hurtful to Israel,” said Mr. Richards, a former mutual fund manager who is now a private investor. “The policy is wrong, and we as Americans have condoned it and supported it.”

The Arc grew out of a proposal by another donor, Guilford Glazer, that Rand design a new Palestinian city to accommodate any returning refugees of the 1948 Israeli-Arab war and their descendants. Born in Knoxville, Tenn., in 1921, Mr. Glazer, a real estate developer, was partly inspired by the model of the Tennessee Valley Authority, believing the Palestinians would benefit from a project of similar scale. (Rand estimated that the Arc would cost about $6 billion, and that it would help the Palestinians power their economy by employing 100,000 to 160,000 Palestinians a year for five years.) When the Arc is built, he said, “it’ll be too precious to lose, and it’ll cause them to resist violence.”