And Rawabi gets at something even more fundamental. "It touches upon all of the core issues of control and sovereignty," says Robert Danin, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who, as head of the Quartet mission in Jerusalem from 2008 to 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 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 been paved, and there are terraced retaining walls, built out of thick stacks of local sandstone, running all the way to the bottom of the valley. No bleachers have been installed in the amphitheater yet, but it's fairly far along, with the future seating area fanning into a wide notch in the mountainside. There are attractive stone signs bearing the stylized Arabic names of neighborhoods that haven't been built yet.