It may come as little surprise that efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict bear striking similarities to approaches to the treatment of mental illness.

There are those who advocate talk sessions, in which the same problems may be discussed and analyzed for years on end before a reaching a breakthrough ? which may prove fleeting at best.

There are the proponents, as well as the vociferous, morally outraged critics, of performing radical forms of surgery to cure intractable ills.

There are those who believe that religion, not science or reason, can put the demons to rest.

And, of course, in the Middle East as in psychotherapy, it is at times difficult to tell with certainty which are the doctors and which the patients.

Analysis of the Israel-Palestine impasse is often thoughtful and frequently creative, but has been unable to yield a working solution to the dispute. Whole libraries of journalistic observation, learned commentary and academic research have been devoted to one version or another of the central question - What's wrong with these people? Why in heaven's name are the Israelis and Palestinians unable to make so much as a semblance of peace? The data mount, the pile of prospective solutions towers higher by the year, but the Israel-Palestine war stumbles on.

In general, fresh approaches to the conflict tend to be activist in nature. Which makes all the more revolutionary the thesis of a remarkable new proposal: Let the Middle East alone.

A recent Prospect magazine cover is headed "Why the Middle East doesn't matter," highlighting a remarkable article by historian Edward Luttwak which, with a perverse elan and a clearly intentional political incorrectness, suggests how analysts and well-meaning foreign governments may have gotten the Mideast conflict dead wrong.

"The operational mistake that Middle East experts keep making is the failure to recognize that backward societies must be left alone," Luttwak writes. He attacks what he calls Arab-Israeli catastrophism, or "five minutes to midnight" syndrome, in which the Mideast conflict is continually viewed as the trigger of an imminent apocalypse (just this week, columnist Roger Cohen, writing in The New York Times, alluded to the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation as "The mother of all conflicts").

According to Luttwak, both the hardline and "softline" approaches are doomed to failure. Hardliners keep suggesting that with a bit of well-aimed violence ('the Arabs only understand force') compliance will be obtained. But what happens every time is an increase in hostility; defeat is followed not by collaboration, but by sullen non-cooperation and active resistance too."

As for "softliners,' who argue "that if only this or that concession were made, if only their policies were followed through to the end and respect shown, or simulated, hostility would cease and a warm Mediterranean amity would emerge," Luttwak counters that Islam "promises superiority in all things for its believers, so that the scientific and technological and cultural backwardness of the lands of Islam generates a constantly renewed sense of humiliation and of civilisational defeat. That fully explains the ubiquity of Muslim violence, and reveals the futility of the palliatives urged by the softliners."

"With neither invasions nor friendly engagements, the peoples of the Middle East should finally be allowed to have their own history, the one thing that Middle East experts of all stripes seem determined to deny them," Luttwak concludes.

There are signs that Luttwak may already be getting his wish. Last month, at the height of the Hamas-Fatah fighting, Newsweek found it necessary to title a cover piece "Why Gaza matters."

It may also be argued that the world's obsession with the Middle East conflict, the media's wall-to-wall coverage of it - as opposed to Darfur, say, or other conflicts in which many more people are dying in places the media finds less attractive to major viewing markets - all this compounded by the extremism and lack of perspective of many Diaspora supporters of Israel or of Palestine, works to the advantage of militants and makes the conflict that much more difficult to solve.

The impression Luttwak's article makes, is that even if Israelis and Palestinians cannot find a solution, the world will manage somehow. He's probably right. What he doesn't specify, doubtless intentionally, is how Israelis and Palestinians are going to be able to manage.

What, then, are some of the factors making this particular form of mental illness so resistant to treatment? What, in sum, is the matter with these people? Herewith a few: