The killing, on both sides, continues. The Israeli government is taking the approach that the reason that what they are doing isn't working is that they aren't doing it hard enough. The Arabs are the ones with a solution that looks like it might work.

Background / Saudi plan impossible for Israel to ignore

Reducing an ineffably complex conflict to one simple equation, a Saudi prince has managed what no one else has done, drawing the bottom line of Mideast strife, and in the process, forcing Israel to confront peace terms it has quietly feared for decades.

Unclear if they are facing one more desert mirage, or alternatively a shockingly simple way out of the diplomatic wilderness, Israeli leaders have warily welcomed Crown Prince Abdullah's surprise peace initiative, whose wildfire resonance across the Arab world has made it impossible for the Jewish state to ignore.

To the discreet horror of rightists, the plan offers what Israel has historically most dearly sought, in exchange for what hawks have traditionally been most adamantly opposed to surrendering: full recognition and normalization of ties with the entire Arab world at the price of return to the bare-bones borders that existed before the 1967 Six Day war.
[read more]

Luckily, the plan is not feasible

The settlers and their supporters, so terrified at the possibility that Ariel Sharon's security buffer plan would leave them outside the fence, have nothing to worry about. The extravagant plan, according to which dozens of kilometers of walls and fences would be built, electronic gizmos installed, mine fields laid, dogs positioned and battalions of soldiers and policemen stationed - will never be carried out.

The public likes ideas that create the illusion that Palestinians are invisible. Yitzhak Rabin's popular 1992 election slogan was "To get Gaza out of Tel Aviv," and Ehud Barak's similar slogan was "We are here and they are there." The State of Israel has invested millions of shekels in the territories to create a separation between the settlers and the Arabs, building special roads just for Jews - which have now turned into death traps because they make it so easy for terrorists to zero in on Israeli cars.

Sharon's security buffer plan, like similar separation plans in the past, is more Israeli wishful thinking (especially because these programs do not involve the uprooting of the settlements) than anything else. The West Bank and Gaza Strip are not Lebanon, Egypt or Jordan. In the territories that were occupied in 1967, over 200,000 Jews live in the West Bank and Gaza and some 250,000 in the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. And on the other side, a million or more Arabs live within sovereign Israel as citizens, while over 200,000 are non-citizens in East Jerusalem. These two national groups are intertwined, and while separation between them may be theoretically possible, hardly anyone in the country would be willing to pay the price.
[read more]

The reality is that the Israeli Right doesn't want peace. They want the Palestinians gone from Gaza and the West Bank by whatever means. That's the whole idea of the settlements. However, the Saudi plan is exactly what the Israeli left has wanted. The question is can Israel hold together with those extremes in it's society? Which will prevail?