Baldrick: "I have ... a cunning plan. It's as cunning as a fox who's just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University. 

The thing is, we want all this land, but we don't want those Arab people what live on it.  

These days, you can't simply bundle people onto wagons and cart them away, you have to have a more positive policy that will sort of ... encourage ... people to leave. [1] 

So ... how about if we pretend we want to get along with them, and start having talks about how we're all going to share the land. We could call it ... a peace process. But ... and this is the really cunning part ... we make sure the talks never actually succeed in resolving how to share the land equitably [2], and we keep taking over more and more of their land even while we're "negotiating" with them over it! [3] 

And all the time we're dragging out these endless negotiations about nothing in particular, we will be building great big walls and checkpoints around their towns to keep them locked in, and moving our own people onto all the bits of land the Arabs can't access anymore. By the time people catch on to what we're doing, we will have declared all the Arabs' productive land "abandoned" and taken it for ourselves, and all their water supplies will be in our hands. And they will be stuck in overcrowded, isolated, parched reservations. [4]  

Of course they won't be very happy about this, in fact they might just be very angry indeed, and even the most placid of them might happily contemplate the possibility of sticking our collective head on a pike. But once they are stuck behind 25ft concrete walls, they won't be able to do anything about it. Their only choice will be to scurry around uselessly in their townships like bugs in a bottle [5], or to leave altogether, which would be even better. 

It is the most cunning plan in the history of cunning plans. 

Nothing ... could possibly go wrong!" 

I Have ... A Cunning Plan