Blathering about the Holy Land

I am so sick of the Middle East, and especially the whole problem of Israel and the Holy Land. How dumb is it that the three biggest religions (I think - I'm pretty sure Hindus and Buddhists don't have the numbers to crack into the top 3), which all share a common background and should at least be somewhat civil to each other, claim the same 10,000 square miles as their holy land (or one of its holy lands in the case of Islam)? Couldn't at least one of them have just picked southern Europe? Or Africa? Or ANYWHERE else, just to make things easier for the rest of us?

Sure, officially religion isn't at the heart of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It's "just" a matter of the Palestinians displaced by the United Nations' creation of the Israeli state - but it's still a religious matter at heart. Given the fact that both sides have been saying for more than a dozen years that a two-state solution is an acceptable one, why is this still going on? Oh, that's right - Hamas is dedicated not only to achieving independence, but also to the utter destruction of Israel itself. Man, I never would have thought that I'd be missing Yasir Arafat, but with the way things have devolved since his death, I have to say that I actually do. He at least managed to sort of rein in the extremists on the Palestinian side of things and offered a singular path of negotiation to try and get a solution figured out.

Still, given the fact that Islam shares the same tradition of Abraham and Moses with Judaism, you'd think they could figure something out that's acceptable to both sides. I mean, if you believe that Moses was a prophet and that he received the 10 Commandments (which I think is a common belief for both religions, but I could be wrong about Islam), then that basic concept of "Thou shalt not kill" is ingrained in both, so where's the peace? Tell me - WHERE... IS... THE... PEACE?? At the very least, can't they bond a bit over the fact they were both persecuted horribly in Europe for most of the last 1000 years?