I'm back from our fun "Singuarlity Week" in Tel Aviv, where we did a 2 day and 1 day Singularity University program. We judged a contest for two scholarships by Israelis for SU, and I spoke to groups like Garage Geeks, Israeli Defcon, GizaVC's monthly gathering and even went into the west bank to address the Palestinian IT Society and announce a scholarship contest for SU.

Of course I did more photography, though the weather did not cooperate. However, you will see six new panoramas on my Israel Panorama Page and my Additional Israeli panoramas. My favourite is the shot of the western wall during a brief period of sun in a rainstorm.

In Ramallah, the telecom minister for the Palestinian Authority asked us, jokingly, "how can this technology end the occupation?" But I wanted to come up with a serious answer. Everybody who goes to the middle east tries to come up with a solution or at least some sort of understanding. Israelis get a bit sick of it, annoyed that outsiders just don't understand the incredible depth and nuance of the problem. Outsiders imagine the Israelis and Palestinians are so deep in their conflict that they are like fish who no longer see the water.

In spite of those warnings, here's my humble proposal for how to use new media technology to help.

Take classrooms of Israelis and classrooms of Palestinians and give them a mandatory school assignment. Their assignment is to be paired with an online buddy from the "other side." Students would be paired based on a matching algorithm, considering things like their backgrounds, language skills or languages and subjects they want to learn. The other student, with whom they would interact over online media and video-conferencing (like Skype or Google Hangouts,) would become a study partner and the students would collaborate on projects suitable to them. They might also help one another learn a language, like English, Arabic or Hebrew. Students would be encouraged to add their counterpart to their social networking circles.

Both students would also be challenged to write an essay attempting to see the world from the point of view of the other. They will not be asked to agree with it, but simply to be able to write from that point of view. And their counterpart must agree at the end that it mostly does reflect their point of view. Students would be graded on this.

It would be important not to have this be a "forced friendship." The students would be told it was not demanded they forget their preconceptions; not demanded they agree with everything their counterpart says. In fact, they would be encouraged to avoid conflict, to not immediately contradict statements they think are false. That the goal is not to convince their counterpart of things but to understand and help them understand. And in particular, projects should be set up where the students naturally work together viewing the teachers as the common enemy.

At the end of the year, a meeting would be arranged. For example, west bank students would be thrilled at a chance to visit the beach or some amusement park. A meeting on the west bank border on neutral ground might make sense too, though parents would be paranoid about safety and many would veto trips by their children into the west bank.

Would this bring peace? Hardly on its own. But it would improve things if every student at least knew somebody from outside their world, and had tried to understand their viewpoint even without necessarily agreeing with it. And some of the relationships would last, and the social networks would grow. Soon each student would have at least one person in their network from outside their formerly insular world. This would start with some schools, but ideally it would be something for every student to do. And it could even be expanded to include online pen-pals from other countries. With some students it would fail, particularly older ones whose views are already set. Alas, for younger ones, finding a common language might be difficult. Few Israelis learn Arabic, more Palestinians learn Hebrew and all eventually want to learn English. Somebody has to provide computers and networking to the poorer students, but it seems the cost of this is small compared to the benefit.