Visit to Rawabi Palestinian City Project by US Security Professionals

2010, witnessed some of the political discussions that accompanied the project's creation. "This could be a huge, iconic victory for the whole strategy of building Palestine from the bottom up rather than trying to build it at the negotiating table," he says. Its success would prove just how much power Palestinians can, and indeed already do, have in shaping their future. And its failure could prove the exact opposite. I visited Rawabi two weeks ago with a group of national security professionals, as part of a trip organized by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington, DC-based think tank. (All of the photos in the body of the article are mine.) We were taken around the construction site by a young Palestinian engineer who conveyed the vast ambition underlying the project: When the city is completed, she said, it will house 45,000 people in 23 distinct neighborhoods with innocuous, nature- based names like "Flint," and "Hard Rock". (Rawabi is Arabic for "Hills".) There will be eight schools -- some of them built with the help of the U.S. Agency for International Development -- a "huge park," a convention center, an 850-seat indoor theater, and a 20,000-seat amphitheater carved into a hillside. Most ambitiously, there will be a commercial center that developers hope HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028708