Ken Layne’s Fox News column yesterday had a novel proposal for resolving the conflict over Palestine–move the Jews to Baja California. It’s actually not as wacky as it sounds–the Zionist movement considered many locations before settling on present-day Israel, including Uganda, Libya, Iraq, Angola, Canada, Australia, Madagascar, Siberia, and even the southwest United States. In fact, a settlement of several thousand was established in Texas just before the first World War.

But you know me. When you’re a jackhammer, everything looks like concrete, and when you’re a space geek, every terrestrial problem has an extraterrestrial solution. So I’d like to reprise a proposal that I made on this very weblog back in October–let’s establish a Jewish state on the Moon.

They’ve got to be getting tired of the flying shrapnel and body parts to the point that anywhere else would look good. It’s territory that no one else is claiming (though the 1967 Outer Space Treaty actually precludes national sovereignty claims off planet, but the Israelis couldn’t get anyone who mattered any more upset with them by breaking it).

And judging by their current rate of technological progress (as demonstrated by their haphazard success in killing people with crude suicide/homicide bombs, a simple-minded technology if ever there was one), it will be many decades or centuries before the Palestinians develop space travel themselves to follow them out there.

If we help them with transportation, it will create the mass market that we need to drive down space transport costs, and develop the technology that we need to conquer the space frontier. Sounds like a win-win to me.