A Muppet Middle East Peace

Where diplomacy fails, send in the Muppets. Dafi, a purple Israeli Muppet, and Haneen, an orange Palestinian one, are taking the fractured Middle East peace process into their own furry hands.

A joint Israeli-Palestinian production of Sesame Street has been three years in the making, and finally makes it to Israel and Palestinian television on April 1. "We all assumed it would not be easy," Lewis Bernstein, the show's American executive producer, said Thursday. "We were right." The 60 half-hour segments were produced by Israeli and Palestinian teams working separately at studios in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem; the series includes "crossover" segments in which characters from one street visit the other.

"If the adults working on the Sesame Street project can do this, certainly our children can do it too," said Dolly Wolbrum, the series' Israeli executive producer. Too bad it'll be a couple of decades before the kids grow up and we find out if it worked.