HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028716 For instance, developers were surprised to find out that, by a quirk in the West Bank's notoriously Byzantine and palimpsestic legal codes, they required the approval of a joint Israeli-Palestinian water commission created through the Oslo Accords to build a sewage treatment plant in an Area A, approval that they recently received. There's also the still-unresolved matter of the access road. But thus far, Rawabi had flourished in spite of delays and inconveniences. Could it survive its isolation, though -- could this hilltop off of a two-lane highway get enough water and electricity to support 45,000 people living at a middle class standard? "There is nothing here at all. We're out in the boondocks," he conceded. "We're building everything from scratch." One needed only to glance at the busy construction site below to understand that Masri considers this a point of pride, far from a potential death-sentence for his project. I asked Masri about something that had jumped out at me during the 3-D video. The finished Rawabi, I'd noted, had the same terraced garden parks, stoic, modular apartment design, and concentric hilltop roads that I had seen in Talpiyot Misrach, a new neighborhood on the fringes of West Jerusalem. His city looked very, well, Israeli.