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will bring in between 3,000 and 5,000
permanent jobs within the next five years --
hopefully, we were told, in the
informational technology sector (an
aspiration that might imply a certain
cooperation with the burgeoning tech
industry on the other side of the Green
Line). The engineer said that Rawabi had
already created 3,000 construction jobs for
West Bank Palestinians. The city is
Palestinian-designed and Palestinian-built -
- making the surfeit of Qatari flags at the
construction site somewhat puzzling at
first. And while the project does not
purchase materials from Jewish settlements
in the West Bank, the engineer was hardly
shy in explaining that Rawabi would add
an estimated $85 million to the Israeli
economy.
As we drove around the construction site,
the engineer's talk made few demands on
the imagination. The sheer scale of the
project is already obvious. Within the next
18 months, the first phase, which includes
six neighborhoods, a mosque, the
amphitheater, and two-thirds of the city's
commercial center, will be complete, and
3,000 people are scheduled will move into
Rawabi by the end of 2013. Apartment
blocks built of a local white stone --
"Rawabi stone," the engineer called it -- are
already rising out of a network of
concentric ring-roads centered on the top of
the hill. Most of these roads have already

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