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cle 1. 
Jeffrey Epstein [jeeyacation@gmail.com] 
2/15/2013 12:42:34 AM 
Larry Summers 
as you asked 
The Washington Post 
In State of the Union  
address, Obama lays out 
his second-term agenda  
Editorial 
February 13, 2013 -- TWO DOMESTIC 
concerns towered above all others as 
President Obama addressed a joint session 
of Congress on Tuesday night on the state  
of the union. One was stubbornly slow 
economic growth. The other was the long-
term threat to prosperity posed by the 
structural mismatch between the federal 
government's projected revenue and its 
spending commitments. A successful 
second term for Mr. Obama will require 
both credible proposals for overcoming 
those related challenges and the 
determination to carry them through. 
The president addressed the deficit and 
debt first, and at some length. This was 
fitting, giving that the most pressing piece 
of business facing Washington is what to 
do about the impending $85 billion across-
the-board spending cut. He was forthright 
Office of Terje Rod-Larsen 
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in declaring that this so-called sequester 
threatens the military as well as domestic 
programs. But his plan to avoid it basically 
repeated the offer of a "balanced approach" 
— unspecified tax hikes and spending cuts 
— which Republicans have already 
rejected. 
Somewhat more substantively, he called for 
a larger deficit-reduction deal built around 
loophole-closing tax reform and what he 
called "modest" reforms to Medicare and 
entitlements. In an apparent effort to rally 
Democrats to this cause, he called on 
"those of us who care deeply about 
programs like Medicare" to "embrace" 
reform. 
Yet in promising the same amount of 
Medicare savings as the Simpson-Bowles 
commision proposed, Mr. Obama did not 
mention that this would be a mere $341 
billion over 10 years. All told, he envisions 
shaving an additional $1.5 trillion off 
projected deficits over 10 years, which 
would leave the national debt at a 
historically aberrant 70-odd percent of 
gross domestic product. In short, he 
declined to push back against the mind-set 
within his party that considers acceptable 
"stabilizing" the debt at this level by the 
time Mr. Obama's second term ends. At 
best, that would buy a respite of a few 
years before the debt resumed its upward 
climb. 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028676 
As for raising the economy's growth 
potential, the president was more 
persuasive. His emphasis on reforming the 
tangled and counterproductive corporate 
tax code was especially welcome, and 
relatively likely to draw GOP support. He 
offered several promising ideas on 
education, including a promise of "high-
quality preschool" for all children, though 
how that would square with his promise not 
to increase the deficit by a single dime 
went unexplained. He sounded a ringing 
call for greater federal attention to college 
cost containment. "Taxpayers can't keep on 
subsidizing" spiraling tuition, he said, 
candidly and correctly. 
As European trading partners had hoped, 
the president endorsed negotiations for a 
transatlantic free-trade zone, which would 
help America's export industries and the 
jobs that depend on them. Coupled with an 
agreement that Obama is promoting for the 
Pacific region, the proposal has the 
potential to make his second term fruitful 
for global trade. He also suggested raising 
the federal minimum wage, from $7.25 per 
hour to $9 — although the precise amount 
is less important, in our view, than the 
president's call for annual cost-of-living 
adjustments. 
In keeping with Mr. Obama's theme of 
nation-building at home, foreign policy 
played a secondary role in his speech. He 
promised to bring home half of the 
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remaining U.S. troops in Afghanistan 
within the next year. But officials said the 
withdrawal would be weighted toward 
year's end, leaving most of the troops to 
partner with Afghan troops for much of this 
year. The president said the United States 
would support democratic transitions in the 
Middle East, "keep the pressure on [the] 
Syrian regime" and "do what is necessary 
to prevent" Iran from obtaining a nuclear 
weapon — but he offered no specifics. 
Mr. Obama pressed his case for reform of 
immigration laws and for action to slow 
global warming — and, in especially 
moving terms, tougher gun laws. In each 
case, there may be measures he can take 
through executive action, but new laws will 
be needed for substantial progress. 
Mr. Obama was right when he pointed to 
the survivors and grieving relatives of gun 
violence victims and insisted, "They 
deserve a vote." 
Article 2 
Foreign Policy 
The world is no longer 
America's problem  
Aaron David Miller 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028678 
February 13, 2013 -- If you want to know 
what an American president's foreign 
policy is likely to be, particularly in a 
second term, don't listen to his State of the 
Union speech. You'd probably have more 
luck playing with Tarot cards, or reading 
tea leaves or goat entrails. But not this year. 
Barack Obama's fourth such address left a 
trail of foreign-policy cookie crumbs that 
lead directly to some pretty clear, if hardly 
surprising or revolutionary, conclusions. 
His first term contained no spectacular 
successes (save killing Osama bin Laden), 
but no spectacular failures either. And 
more than likely, that's what the president 
will settle for in a second, even as the Arab 
world burns and rogues like Iran and North 
Korea brandish new weapons. He's nothing 
if not a cautious man. 
Behold: I am the Extricator in Chief 
Afghanistan -- the "good war" -- has been 
pretty much MIA in Obama's speeches 
since he became president. He's alternated 
between spending a few words on the 
mission there (2009) or a paragraph (2010, 
2011, 2012). If his words have been brief, 
the message has been stunningly clear: It's 
about the leaving. And tonight was no 
exception. Not more than two minutes in, 
the president spoke about America's men 
and women coming home from 
Afghanistan. 
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Obama's signature is indeed that of the 
extricator. And he broke the code early (the 
2009 surge was designed politically to get 
in so that he could get out with a clearer 
conscience). He is the president who has 
wound down the longest and among the 
most profitless wars in American history, 
where victory was never defined by 
whether we can win, but by when can we 
leave. It is his legacy, and one about which 
he has reason to be proud. Obama has left 
himself and his military commanders 
plenty of discretion about the pace of 
extrication. But that's fine with the 
president so long as they're heading for the 
exits. 
Not the Destroyer and Rebuilder of Worlds 
Surprise, surprise: There was scant mention 
of Syria in the president's speech -- just one 
throwaway line about supporting Syria's 
opposition. Obama did not disengage from 
Iraq and Afghanistan only to plunge 
America into new black holes in the 
Middle East. 
Obama isn't worried about boots on the 
ground in Syria. That was never on the 
table. Instead the question is this: Given the 
uncertainty about the end state in Syria and 
the risks of providing serious weapons to 
the rebels (and a no-fly zone) that might 
alter the arc of the fight against the regime, 
the president saw and continues to see no 
purpose in America providing arms of 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028680 
marginal utility. That course would either 
expose him to be truly weak and ineffectual 
or lead to calls to do more. So he's going to 
provide non-lethal support and is 
apparently prepared to take the hits from 
critics who see the president's policy as 
passive, cruel, and unforgiving, particularly 
now that we know that members of his own 
cabinet clearly wanted to do more. The 
Iranian nuclear issue, the other potential tar 
baby in the SOTU, followed a pretty 
predictable rising arc of concern in the list 
of presidential foreign-policy worries. In 
2009, in Obama's address to a joint session 
of Congress (a speech some regard as a 
SOTU), Iran wasn't even mentioned. In the 
2010 SOTU, Obama threatened that if Iran 
ignored its international obligations, there 
would be consequences; in 2011, he did the 
same; and in 2012, he made it clear that he 
would prevent Iran from acquiring a 
nuclear weapon and take no option off the 
table. Obama repeated half of what he said 
in 2012 about preventing Iran from getting 
a nuclear weapon, but instead of saying all 
options were on the table, he spoke of the 
importance of diplomacy. I suspect he'll go 
to extreme lengths to avoid war, and won't 
greenlight an Israeli attack either until the 
arc of diplomacy has run its course. And 
then Obama would likely act only if the 
mullahs push the envelope by accelerating 
their uranium enrichment program and 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028681 
other military aspects of the nuclear 
enterprise. 
Seizing the Nuclear High Road with Little 
to Lose 
Even as he confronts a real bomb in North 
Korea (very bad options there) and a 
potential one in Iran (bad options there 
too), Obama is trying to make good on a 
longstanding commitment to reduce 
America's own nuclear arsenal. Backed by 
the military chiefs and likely by the public 
too (getting rid of nukes equals saving 
money), but opposed by Republicans in 
Congress, Obama will try to work around 
the political obstacles by seeking a deal 
with yes ... you got it ... his old friend Vlad 
Putin. It's worth a try. If Putin balks or 
Republicans get in the way, the president 
can always advocate unilateral cuts -- not 
something he wants to do. But if he can't 
have his way on nukes, he can always 
blame it on the Russians and the 
Republicans with little to lose. The road to 
getting rid of nukes is a long one. Let the 
next guy (or gal) worry about it. 
A Little Leg on Palestine? 
Obama hasn't mentioned the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict in a SOTU speech since 
2009. And that's no coincidence. His own 
poorly thought-through initial effort 
crashed and burned, leaving the president 
pretty frustrated and annoyed with both 
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Israelis and Palestinians, particularly Israeli 
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 
But hey, that was then. A second-term 
president has committed himself early in 
2013 to a trip to Israel and has an Energizer 
bunny in Secretary of State John Kerry, 
who wants to do the right thing and keep 
the two-state solution alive. Obama clearly 
kept his distance from the issue again on 
Tuesday night. He spoke of standing with 
Israel to pursue peace, but didn't mention 
Palestinians or the peace process. He 
mentioned his own trip to the Middle East, 
but missed an opportunity to give what 
might be a trip to the region by his new 
secretary of state higher profile. It's just as 
well. The paradox of the Israeli-Palestinian 
issue is that it's too complicated to 
implement right now and too important to 
abandon. It's in this space that Obama will 
be forced to operate. And while the odds of 
success are low, Obama will be tempted in 
his final term to do something bold, 
perhaps laying out a U.S. plan of 
parameters on the key final-status issues. 
It's the Middle Class, Not the Middle East 
Spoiler alert: Barack Obama might still be 
a consequential foreign-policy president if 
he's lucky, willful, and skillful. But it's his 
domestic legacy that will make or break his 
presidency. Health care -- his signature 
legacy issue -- will look much better if the 
economy improves, driven by a revived 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028683 
housing market and rising employment, 
and of course if some broader deal can be 
struck on entitlements and taxes. 
Immigration reform and gun-control 
legislation driven by a functional 
bipartisanship would cement that legacy. 
He'd be an historic rather than a great 
president. 
Two clocks tick down in a president's 
second term: the drive for legacy and the 
reality of lame duckery. Obama's political 
capital will diminish quickly. Where, how, 
and on what he wants to spend it is critical. 
The Middle East is violent and volatile and 
may yet suck him in, but if he can avoid it, 
he'll try. This was a State of the Union 
address that stressed fixing America's 
broken house, not chasing around the world 
trying to fix everyone else's. The future of 
America isn't Cairo or Damascus; it's 
Chicago and Detroit. 
Aaron David Miller is a distinguished 
scholar at the Woodrow Wilson 
International Center for Scholars. 
Article 3. 
Agence Global 
Can the United States  
Strike a Deal with Iran?  
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Patrick Seale 
12 Feb 2013 -- Negotiations with Iran are 
once more on the international agenda. 
After an eight-month break, the five 
permanent members of the UN Security 
Council plus Germany -- the so-called 
P5+1 -- are due to hold a meeting with Iran 
on 25 February in Kazakhstan. What are 
the prospects of success? In a nutshell, that 
would seem to depend more on the climate 
in Washington than in Tehran. Iran is 
gesturing that it wants to negotiate, but 
Washington has not yet signalled any 
greater flexibility than in the past. 
In a major speech in Tehran last Sunday, 
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad 
addressed the United States: "Take your 
guns out of the face of the Iranian nation 
and I myself will negotiate with you," he 
declared. Meanwhile, the Iranian 
ambassador to Paris told French officials 
that, provided a work plan was agreed, Iran 
was ready to allow inspectors of the 
International Atomic Energy Agency 
(IAEA) to visit Parchin, a military facility 
where Iran is suspected of having done 
work on atomic weapons. Ahmadinejad 
himself has said repeatedly that Iran was 
ready to stop enriching uranium to 20% if 
the international community agreed to 
supply it instead to the Tehran research 
reactor for the production of isotopes 
needed to treat cancer patients. 
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The only recent encouraging word from the 
United States was a hint by Vice-President 
Joe Biden at last week's Munich security 
conference that the time may have come 
for bilateral U.S.-Iranian talks. Iran's 
Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi 
responded positively to Biden's offer, 
although he added that Iran would look for 
evidence that Biden's offer was 'authentic' 
and not 'devious'. 
The road to a U.S.-Iranian agreement is 
littered with obstacles -- grave mutual 
distrust being one of them. There is little 
optimism among experts that a 
breakthrough is imminent. For one thing, 
Iran is almost certain to want to defer any 
major strategic decision until a new 
President is elected next June to replace the 
sharp-tongued Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. To 
strike a deal with Iran, the United States 
would also need to assure its Arab allies in 
the Gulf that they would not fall under 
Iranian hegemony or lose American 
protection. Guarantees would no doubt 
have to be given. 
Israel, America's close ally, poses a more 
substantial obstacle. It is totally opposed to 
any deal which would allow Iran to enrich 
uranium, even at the low level of 3.5%. 
Wanting no challenge to its own 
formidable nuclear arsenal, Israel's long-
standing aim has been to halt Iran's nuclear 
programme altogether. To this end it has 
assassinated several Iranian nuclear 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028686 
scientists and joined the United States in 
waging cyber warfare against Iranian 
nuclear facilities. Its belligerent prime 
minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has for 
years been pressing Obama to destroy 
Iran's nuclear programme and -- better still 
-- bring down the Islamic regime 
altogether. 
Faced with these obstacles, it is clear that 
any U.S. deal with Iran would require 
careful preparation. Obama would need to 
mobilize strong domestic support if he is to 
confront America's vast array of pro-Israeli 
forces. They include Congressmen eager to 
defend Israeli interests at all costs (as was 
vividly illustrated by the recent Chuck 
Hagel confirmation hearings), powerful 
lobbies such as AIPAC, media barons, 
high-profile Jewish financiers like Sheldon 
Adelson, a phalanx of neo-con strategists in 
right-wing think tanks, influential pro-
Israelis within the Administration, and 
many, many others. The cost in political 
capital of challenging them could be very 
substantial. Nevertheless, elected for a 
second term, he now has greater freedom 
and authority than before. 
Obama is due to visit Israel on March 20-
21, something he did not do in his first 
term. This visit will be the first foreign trip 
of his second term -- in itself a sign of its 
importance. Although the White House is 
anxious to play down suggestions that he 
will announce a major initiative, either on 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028687 
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or on Iran, 
there are issues he cannot avoid. He may, 
however, choose to raise them in private 
talks with Israeli leaders rather than in 
public. His message is expected to be 
twofold: Israel should not delay in granting 
statehood to the Palestinians, however 
painful that choice may be, and it should be 
careful not to make an eternal enemy of 
Iran. Both conflicts have the potential to 
isolate Israel internationally and threaten its 
long-term interests, if not its actual 
existence. 
In his first term of office, Obama resisted 
Netanyahu's pressure to wage war on Iran. 
This was no more than a semi-success, 
however, since he managed to blunt 
Netanyahu's belligerence only by imposing 
on Iran a raft of sanctions of unprecedented 
severity. They have halved Iran's oil 
exports, caused its currency to plummet 
and inflation to gallop, severed its relations 
with the world's banks and inflicted severe 
hardship on its population. 
The key question today is this: What are 
Obama's intentions? Is he seeking to bring 
down Iran's Islamic regime, as Israel 
would like, or is he simply seeking to limit 
its nuclear ambitions? If 'regime change' is 
his aim then sanctions will have to be 
tightened even further and extended 
indefinitely. But if Obama's aim is to strike 
a deal with Iran over its nuclear programme 
then he must give it at least some of what it 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028688 
wants: such as sanctions relief; acceptance 
of its right under the Nuclear Non-
Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium to a 
low level for peaceful purposes; 
recognition of its security interests, of the 
legitimacy of its Islamic regime born out of 
the 1979 revolution, and of its place in the 
region as a major power. 
The P5+1, which are due to meet Iran later 
this month, remain so divided that they are 
unlikely to improve substantially on their 
previous miserly offer, which was to 
provide Iran with some airplane spare parts 
if it gave up uranium enrichment to 20% --
its trump card. It is the paralysis of Iran's 
dealings with the P5+1 that has lent 
credence to the idea that the best hope of a 
breakthrough may lie in bilateral U.S.-
Iranian talks -- perhaps even a summit 
meeting between President Obama and 
Ayatollah Khomeini. 
For such a summit to be successful the 
United States would have to change its 
approach. Iran's supreme leader has made 
clear that Iran will not negotiate under 
threat of attack. There would have to be 
give and take. Above all, Iran wants to be 
treated with respect. This is the challenge 
facing Obama. 
It is worth remembering that there is as yet 
no evidence whatsoever that Iran has 
decided to build nuclear weapons. Nor has 
it developed a reliable delivery system. 
Instead, it has focussed its efforts on 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028689 
medium-range missiles unable to reach 
Israel. It has no second strike capability. As 
President Ahmadinejad stressed during his 
visit to Cairo last week, Iran has no 
intention of attacking Israel. Its posture is 
purely defensive. 
If Obama were to act with boldness and 
vision, he could defuse a nagging problem 
which has plagued the region for years. It is 
surely time for the United States to draw 
Iran into the regional community of nations 
and put an end to 34 years of unremitting 
hostility. 
Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on 
the Middle East. His latest book is The 
Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-
Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle 
East (Cambridge University Press). 
Article 4. 
The Washington Post 
What path now for Syria?  
David Ignatius  
February 12, 2013 -- Syrian opposition 
fighters appear to be making significant  
gains on the battlefield this week, 
following an offer by their top political 
leader for negotiations with the regime of 
President Bashar al-Assad. 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028690 
This military and diplomatic news may 
appear positive. But Syrian sources caution 
that the battlefield advances may accelerate 
movement toward a breakup of the country, 
as Alawite supporters of the regime retreat 
to their ancestral homeland in the 
northwestern region around Latakia. And 
there's no sign that either Assad or his 
Russian patrons are paying any more than 
lip service to a political settlement. 
One potential game-changer is a request for 
U.S. help in training elite rebel units, which 
has been drafted by Brig. Gen. Salim Idriss, 
the new commander of the opposition Free 
Syrian Army. In a letter dated Feb. 4, he 
seeks U.S. assistance in "training for: (1) 
special operations; (2) international 
humanitarian law; and (3) ... in chemical 
weapons security." 
Idriss requested various supplies for these 
elite units, including: "(1) combat armor; 
(2) night vision goggles; (3) hand held 
monocular and longer range spotting 
equipment; (4) strategic communications; 
(5) winterization packs; and (6) tactical 
communications." 
This request for assistance was made just 
after the Assad regime had rebuffed an 
offer by Sheik Ahmad Moaz al-Khatib, the 
head of a new opposition coalition, to 
negotiate with government representatives. 
The rebels' recent military successes have 
come mostly in northern Syria; the attacks 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028691 
were made by different battalions that 
appear to operate with little central 
command and control. The gains include: 
*The al-Jarrah air base, about 30 miles east 
of Aleppo, which appears to have been 
overrun by fighters from Ahrar al-Sham, a 
battalion based in Idlib. Videos posted 
Tuesday by the rebels showed them 
walking past derelict Syrian warplanes and 
inside a fortified hangar containing what 
appeared to be two Czech-built ground 
assault planes. On camera, the rebels 
displayed dozens of bombs racked in a 
warehouse, and other ammunition and 
spoils of war. 
*The Thawra hydroelectric dam on the 
Euphrates, which is one of Syria's biggest 
power-generating facilities. Rebel sources 
said the Syrian army gave up the strategic 
dam after army positions there were 
overrun. The rebels negotiated a surrender 
with regime loyalists who remained. These 
sources said the dam continues to operate 
and provide power — a positive sign for 
those who worry that Syria's infrastructure 
would collapse if the rebels took over. 
*The Aleppo International Airport, 
southeast of the city, is close to falling. 
Free Syrian Army sources said Tuesday 
that their fighters, including allies in the 
extremist al-Nusra Front, had captured an 
access point near the airport known as 
"Liwa 80." Syrian sources said rebels there 
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had seized large amounts of ammunition, 
including some shoulder-fired anti-aircraft 
missiles. 
*Damascus and its suburbs, where the 
rebels are tightening their squeeze on 
access points to the capital. Syrian sources 
said fighters are converging on Damascus 
from different parts of the country, 
expecting a decisive battle there soon. 
"Regime forces are suffering from very low 
morale, whereas FSA soldiers have been 
encouraged by recent positive 
developments," asserts one FSA report 
from Damascus. 
The al-Nusra Front has been a catalyst and 
beneficiary of the rebels' success. 
According to Syrian sources, al-Nusra is 
gaining strength in Homs, a city in central 
Syria where the group was never strong. 
One Syrian source told the State 
Department: "They have money, they are 
helping people with everything including 
daily living supplies. I heard that some 
fighters are leaving their [former] brigades 
and joining [Al-Nusra], some of them 
selling their weapons to feed their 
families." 
One Syrian who works closely with the 
Free Syrian Army explained how creating 
an elite commando force could help check 
Syria's drift toward becoming a failed 
state: "We still believe FSA on the ground 
is still needed badly to tip the power and 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028693 
support other parallel solutions, including 
the political one. But FSA [has] become a 
jungle. ... My recommendation is ... to 
start working on elite [forces that can] ... 
initiate key attacks plus help as a buffer 
from potential warlords and fights among 
fragmented FSA factions. Plus, this unit 
can handle other key tasks, like securing 
chemical weapons." 
This Syrian strategist argues in another 
memo that the rebels must "speak to the 
silent majority, many who did not care 
about the revolution, and they want their 
life back." He said that such a negotiated 
settlement requires more pressure on the 
United States, Russia and the United 
Nations "to find a way out of the 
deadlock." 
Article 5 
Foreign Policy 
Why Does Europe  
Pretend Hezbollah Has a  
Good Side?  
Matthew Levitt 
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February 12, 2013 -- Bulgaria's interior 
minister announced on Feb. 5 the result of 
his country's investigation into the July 
2012 bombing of a bus filled with Israeli 
tourists in the city of Burgas, which killed 
five Israelis and the vehicle's Bulgarian 
driver. Two of the individuals who carried 
out the terrorist attack, he said, "belonged 
to the military formation of Hezbollah." 
It was not by chance that his statement 
fingered only the military wing of 
Hezbollah, not the group as a whole. 
Within the European Union, the findings of 
the Bulgarian investigation have kicked off 
a firestorm over whether to add the 
Lebanese militant organization -- in whole, 
or perhaps just its military or terrorist 
wings -- to the EU's list of banned terrorist 
groups. But are there in fact distinct wings 
within the self-styled "Party of God"? 
Hezbollah is many things. It is one of the 
dominant political parties in Lebanon, as 
well as a social and religious movement 
catering first and foremost -- though not 
exclusively -- to Lebanon's Shiite 
community. Hezbollah is also Lebanon's 
largest militia, the only one to keep its 
weapons and rebrand its armed elements as 
an "Islamic resistance" in response to the 
terms of the 1989 Taif Accord, which 
ended the Lebanese Civil War. 
While the group's various elements are 
intended to complement one another, the 
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reality is often messier. In part, that has to 
do with compartmentalization of 
Hezbollah's covert activities. It is also, 
however, a result of the group's multiple 
identities -- Lebanese, pan-Shiite, pro-
Iranian -- and the group's multiple and 
sometimes competing goals tied to these 
different identities. 
Hezbollah's ideological commitment to 
Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's 
revolutionary doctrine of velayat-e 
faqih (guardianship of the jurist), which 
holds that a Shiite Islamic cleric should 
serve as the supreme head of government, 
is a key source of conflict. The group is 
thus simultaneously committed to the 
decrees of Iranian clerics, the Lebanese 
state, its sectarian Shiite community within 
Lebanon, and fellow Shiites abroad. 
The consequences of these competing 
ideological drivers was clear in July 2006, 
when Hezbollah dragged Israel and 
Lebanon into a war neither state wanted by 
crossing the U.N.-demarcated border 
between the two countries, killing three 
Israeli soldiers, and kidnapping two more 
in an ambush. They came to the fore again 
two years later, when Hezbollah took over 
West Beirut by force of arms, turning its 
weapons of "resistance" against fellow 
Lebanese citizens. When the chips are 
down, Hezbollah's commitment to Iran 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028696 
trumps its identity as a Lebanese political 
movement. 
The ties that bind Hezbollah's political 
leadership with its international illicit 
activities are also unmistakable. According 
to a CIA document, even before Hassan 
Nasrallah rose to the position of secretary-
general in 1992, he was "directly involved 
in many Hizballah terrorist operations, 
including hostage taking, airline hijackings, 
and attacks against Lebanese rivals." 
Time and again, Hezbollah's political 
personalities have been tied to the group's 
terrorist and criminal activities. Consider a 
major case in the United States: In 2008, 
while Hezbollah operative Ali Karaki was 
planning a Hezbollah attack in Azerbaijan's 
capital, Baku, his brother, Hasan Antar 
Karaki, was helping lead a broad criminal 
conspiracy to sell counterfeit and stolen 
currency in Philadelphia. Luckily, Hasan 
Antar Karaki sold his wares to an 
undercover FBI informant posing as a 
member of the Philadelphia criminal 
underworld. Hasan Antar Karaki proved to 
be a major figure in Hezbollah's forgery 
operations, and he provided an FBI source 
with fraudulent British and Canadian 
passports. 
Meanwhile, in meetings in Lebanon and 
the United States, Hasan Antar Karaki's 
associate, Hassan Hodroj, a Hezbollah 
spokesman and the head of its Palestinian 
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issues portfolio within the group's political 
echelon, sought to procure a long list of 
sophisticated weapons in a black-market 
scheme involving Hezbollah operatives 
across the globe. According to court 
documents, Hodroj wanted "heavy 
machinery" for the "fight against Jews and 
to protect Lebanon." But move forward 
with caution, Hodroj counseled an 
undercover FBI source, because someone 
in the United States could "go to jail for 
100 years" if caught dealing with 
Hezbollah. 
In light of cases like this one, in which 
people overtly affiliated with Hezbollah's 
political activities are engaged in criminal 
and terrorist activities, it becomes 
increasingly difficult to separate 
Hezbollah's overt activities from its covert 
behavior. "Little is known about [the 
Hezbollah military wing's] internal 
command hierarchy," a Western 
government report noted in 2012, "due to 
its highly secretive nature and use of 
sophisticated protective measures." 
The structure and manpower of Hezbollah's 
terrorist operation, which is responsible for 
its financial and logistical activities as well 
as its terrorist operations abroad, are 
similarly opaque. We do know, however, 
that Hezbollah's terrorist network, the 
Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO), was 
formally founded in 1983 when Hezbollah 
master terrorist Imad Mughniyeh fled to 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028698 
Iran after orchestrating the October 1983 
bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps and 
French military barracks in Beirut with his 
brother-in-law, Mustafa Badreddine. 
This much is clear: Since its founding, 
Hezbollah has developed a sophisticated 
organizational and leadership structure. 
The overall governing authority, the Majlis 
al-Shura (Consultative Council), wields all 
decision-making power and directs several 
subordinate functional councils. Each 
functional council reports directly to the 
Majlis al-Shura, which, as Hezbollah 
Deputy Secretary-General Naim Qassem 
wrote in his book, is "in charge of drawing 
the overall vision and policies, overseeing 
the general strategies for the party's 
function, and taking political decisions." 
U.S. assessments echo Qassem's 
description. "Hezbollah has a unified 
leadership structure that oversees the 
organization's complementary, partially 
compartmentalized elements," reads a 
Congressional Research Service report. 
The secretary-general, currently Nasrallah, 
presides over the Majlis al-Shura and 
functions as the group's leader under the 
authority of the "jurist theologian" 
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme 
leader. Five administrative bodies, 
organized around thematic responsibilities, 
run Hezbollah's political, military (jihad), 
parliamentary, executive, and judicial 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028699 
activities. The Majlis al-Shura considers all 
elements of the group's activities, including 
its political and military wings, as part of 
one holistic entity. 
According to Hezbollah's top officials, this 
unity of purpose among the group's diverse 
activities is essential to its success. "If the 
military wing were separated from the 
political wing, this would have 
repercussions, and it would reflect on the 
political scene," Qassem told a Lebanese 
paper in 2000. "Hezbollah's secretary-
general is the head of the Shura Council 
and also the head of the Jihad Council, and 
this means that we have one leadership, 
with one administration." 
The Jihad Council is the functional council 
underneath the Majlis al-Shura responsible 
for all military matters. Qassem writes that 
it "comprises those in charge of resistance 
activity, be that in terms of oversight, 
recruitment, training, equipment, security, 
or any other resistance-related endeavors." 
To accomplish its mission, the council is 
divided into several smaller units in charge 
of protecting the leadership and carrying 
out internal and external surveillance, as 
well as overseas operations. The party's 
security branch is further broken down into 
three subgroups: central, preventive, and 
overseas security. In 2000, a dedicated 
counterintelligence branch was reportedly  
founded as well. 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028700 
Under this structure, Hezbollah's militia 
and terrorist activities, along with its 
security organ, all report to the Jihad 
Council. Until he was killed, Mughniyeh 
was Hezbollah's top militant commander 
and reportedly led the Jihad Council 
himself By some accounts, he also held a 
seat on the Majlis al-Shura, which would 
be typical for the party's standing military 
commander. 
Unlike its sister councils, however, the 
Jihad Council enjoys strategic ambiguity. 
Neither the majority of Hezbollah officials 
nor the party's elected parliamentarians are 
aware of the details of their party's covert 
military and terrorist activities, which are 
decided on by the most senior leadership. 
According to the U.S. government, these 
activities are "executed" by the leadership 
of Hezbollah's military apparatus, known 
as the Islamic Resistance and led by 
Badreddine, and by the IJO, led by Talal 
Hamiyah, and they are "overseen" by 
Nasrallah. 
Europe's approach to Hezbollah has been 
varied. Many European governments have 
resisted international efforts to designate 
the organization as a terrorist group by 
distinguishing between Hezbollah's 
political and military wings. Britain 
distinguishes among Hezbollah's terrorist 
wing (the Islamic Jihad Organization), 
military wing, and political wing, and the 
country banned the IJO in 2000 and the 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028701 
military wing in 2008. The Netherlands, 
however, designated Hezbollah a terrorist 
entity in 2004 without distinguishing 
between the group's political and military 
wings. A 2004 Dutch intelligence report 
highlighted investigations that show 
"Hezbollah's political and terrorist wings 
are controlled by one co-ordinating 
council." 
The European Union has taken action 
against Hezbollah's interests in the past. In 
May 2002, the European Union froze the 
assets of a non-European terrorist group for 
the first time by adding seven Hezbollah-
affiliated individuals, including 
Mughniyeh, to its financial sanctions list 
for terrorism. It did not, however, sanction 
Hezbollah as an organization. On March 
10, 2005, the European Parliament passed a 
nonbinding resolution recognizing that 
"clear evidence exists of terrorist activities 
on the part of Hezbollah" and calling on the 
European Council to take "all necessary 
steps to curtail them." 
But the necessary steps did not occur. 
Instead, most European countries preferred 
to make convenient distinctions between 
the different parts of Hezbollah, even when 
the group's own leadership does not. 
Today, as European leaders consider 
whether to label Hezbollah a terrorist 
group, they should judge the group by the 
totality of its actions. Hezbollah cannot be 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028702 
forgiven its criminal, terrorist, or militant 
pursuits simply because it also engages in 
political or humanitarian ones. As the 
Burgas bus bombing demonstrates, the 
Party of God can and has mobilized 
operatives for everything from criminal 
enterprises to terrorist attacks well beyond 
Lebanon's borders. 
And though Hezbollah is composed of 
multiple committees and branches, it 
operates as a single entity. Hezbollah, the 
U.S. intelligence community has 
determined, is "a multifaceted, disciplined 
organization that combines political, social, 
paramilitary, and terrorist elements" and is 
one in which decisions "to resort to arms or 
terrorist tactics [are] carefully calibrated." 
Hezbollah's Qassem, speaking in October 
2012, concurred: "We don't have a military 
wing and a political one; we don't have 
Hezbollah on one hand and the resistance 
party on the other.... Every element of 
Hezbollah, from commanders to members 
as well as our various capabilities, are in 
the service of the resistance, and we have 
nothing but the resistance as a priority," he 
said. 
Maybe it is time Western leaders finally 
listened to him. 
Matthew Levitt directs the Stein program 
on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the 
Washington Institute for Near East Policy. 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028703 
He is author of "Hizballah and the Qods  
Force in Iran's Shadow War with the West" 
and the forthcoming book Hezbollah: The 
Global Footprint of Lebanon's Party of 
God. 
Article 6. 
The Atlantic 
A Middle-Class Paradise  
in Palestine?  
Armin Rosen 
Feb 11 2013 -- The sole outlet to Rawabi  
sits off a dizzying two-lane highway 
flanked by round, scraggly hills. In this part 
of the West Bank, just north of where the 
Jerusalem suburbs thin into a dry, granite-
gray wilderness, the mountains seem to aid 
in the illusion that Israeli and Palestinian 
spheres of authority can remain perfectly, 
even harmoniously separate. Arabs use the 
road to get to the Palestinian-controlled 
cities of Bir Zeit and Ramallah, for Jewish 
Israelis, the road connects the Jerusalem 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028704 
area to settlements deep inside the northern 
half of the West Bank. 
Ramallah's skyline is barely discernible on 
a hazy day. Ateret, a red-gabled settlement 
of about 90 families that sits high above the 
Rawabi junction -- a community which 
would likely either be vacated or 
incorporated into a Palestinian state under a 
future peace agreement -- flickers in and 
out of view with every delirious knot in the 
road. Even a concrete pillbox looming over 
the highest point along the highway is 
abandoned, its connection to the territory's 
oddly invisible occupying army marked 
only by a tattered Israeli flag that no one 
has bothered to steal or replace. 
Last year was the first since 1973 in which 
no Israeli citizen was killed in a terrorist 
attack originating from the West Bank. As 
on the newly-pacified Gaza-Israel border, a 
tense quiet pervades things here, although a 
bright red sign at the junction reminds one 
category of motorist not to feel too 
complacent. "This road leads to Area 'A' 
Under the Palestinian Authority," it reads 
in Arabic, Hebrew, and broken English. 
"The entrance for Israeli citizens is 
forbidden, dangerous to your lives and is 
against the Israeli law." At the Rawabi 
junction these warnings of latent danger are 
almost comically off-base, partly because 
of the only other marker at the turnoff: a 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028705 
light-green arrow sagging off of a nearby 
post. 
No one lives at the end of the road, which 
is every bit as wavy and disorienting as the 
adjoining highway. It empties into a scene 
that seems engineered for maximum 
bewilderment: three high-rise cranes, 
topped with fluttering Palestinian flags, 
tower over massive stone and concrete 
building frames. Cement-mixers, painted 
the same shade of light green as the arrow 
at the turnoff and marked with the project's 
logo -- a wiry oval with a cute little convex 
loop at the end, like a child's drawing of a 
heart that could also be a tree -- line up to 
receive material from a buzzing, state-of-
the-art plant. The construction site, a 
couple turns up-road of the cement factory, 
is swarming with workers in green 
hardhats. Spotless SUVs with the Rawabi 
logo on the door speed from one side of the 
site to another. 
Rawabi, which will be the first Palestinian 
planned city in the West Bank, runs from 
the top of the mountain to the valley below, 
with its highest point sitting at an elevation 
slightly higher than Ateret, which is now 
constantly visible. In contrast, the chaos of 
Ramallah, stronghold of an insolvent and 
sclerotic Palestinian Authority, feels distant 
in more senses than one. 
Rawabi represents something totally new --
a visionary Palestinian-directed private 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028706 
sector project, with support from both 
Israeli businesses and a major Arab 
government. It has the potential to shift the 
conversation on the region's future on both 
sides of the Green Line. It could convince 
Palestinians -- and the rest of the world --
that the future of the West Bank shouldn't 
be shackled to Ramallah or Jerusalem's 
vacillating willingness to hash out 
fundamental issues. It could prove that 
there's an appetite, both among Palestinian 
consumers and foreign donors, for the 
creation of a social and economic existence 
in the West Bank that's de-coupled, 
insomuch as currently possible, from the 
Middle East's tense and labyrinthine 
politics. 
It would also help solidify the benefits of 
the current cessation in hostilities. Indeed, 
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas's 
progress in fostering the end of violent 
resistance in the West Bank in the years 
after the bloody Second Intifada, coupled 
with Palestinian Prime Minister Salaam 
Fayyad's widely-respected institution-
building initiative, could get a crucial 
private sector assist through Rawabi's 
eventual success. 
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 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028707 
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 
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 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028709 
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. 
The future commercial center is also well 
on its way to completion. Situated on a 
shelf slightly below the summit of the hill, 
the complex of office buildings, hotels, 
theaters, and a convention center will 
huddle around a broad outdoor plaza, 
which will be connected to the lower 
neighborhoods through a wide flight of 
stairs. The stairs, plaza, and central 
buildings are already past their skeletal 
phase, and the high-rise apartments ringing 
the city center look like they're almost 
complete. For now, the commercial core is 
a jumble of dust and brutal concrete 
surfaces, but in the future, someone 
lingering in the cafés near the staircase will 
enjoy phenomenal views of the rugged hill 
country, and perhaps even glimpses of the 
Jordan River Valley on a clear day. 
It is still possible to remain unconvinced of 
Rawabi's reality -- doubtful as to whether 
that café will ever be built, or whether any 
middle class-Palestinian desirous of a 
generic middle class existence will ever 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028710 
linger there. There's abundant reason for 
skepticism. The project's future depends on 
the Israeli authorities' willingness to allow 
for the construction of access roads in 
"Area C," or West Bank territory under the 
direct control of Israel. The sole existing 
route into the city only exists because the 
Israeli government, after years of 
bureaucratic and high-level diplomatic 
wrangling, granted Rawabi's developers a 
permit for a "temporary" road. Technically, 
they will have to destroy the road when the 
current permission expires. And even if the 
Israelis agree to make the road permanent, 
one two-lane route is hardly adequate for a 
city of 45,000 people. Developers claim it 
isn't even adequate to the needs of the 
current construction site. 
Water is another challenge. Negotiations 
with Israel and the Palestinian Water 
Authority are ongoing, and developers say 
they have held in excess of 100 meetings 
with Israeli officials on water-related issues 
alone. Developers admit that they aren't 
sure where the city's water resources will 
eventually come from, and the construction 
site only got running water two months 
ago. 
And they'll admit that attracting jobs to the 
site is an even bigger challenge than Israel's 
West Bank regime. Rawabi isn't meant to 
be a bedroom community of Ramallah. It's 
meant to be a self-contained city, with 
office and retail space. The jobs haven't 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028711 
quite materialized yet (although the 
developers have a slight head start: 
between 200 and 300 call center-type jobs 
currently based in Ramallah are scheduled 
to move into Rawabi when the first phase 
of construction is complete). If the political 
or security situation seriously deteriorates - 
- if the checkpoints return, if the Israelis are 
forced to re-occupy urban areas ceded to 
the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo 
Accords, as happened during the Second 
Intifada; if Hamas wages a violent takeover 
of the Palestinian government -- all bets are 
off The developers don't seem to be 
bothered by those possibilities right now. 
At the showroom, built at the very top of 
the hill, the future is nothing but bright. 
I chatted with another site engineer as we 
walked through a scale-model mock-up of 
a typical Rawabian street, where happy 
families in western dress waved from little 
video screens inset in plastic apartment 
windows. I asked her about the Qatari flags 
I had seen around the construction site. 
Qatar's state investment fund is footing two 
thirds of the nearly $1 billion project bill, 
she said. "This is the biggest investment in 
the history of Palestine," she explained as 
we stepped over a fake valley in the next 
room, walking past a mock-up of a 
stunning hilltop view contained inside a 
mock-up of a future apartment suite. The 
Rawabians will apparently own large flat-
screen TVs and stylish coffee tables, and 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028712 
their living spaces will be kept mercilessly 
clean. 
What, of that $1 billion investment, was 
going to Israel, I asked? Israeli companies 
were providing cement powder and sand, 
she said, and the project had consulted with 
"Israeli experts." "In some cases, you have 
to do that," she said, alluding to the 
comparative difficulty of importing 
building materials through neighboring 
Jordan. In other words, working with the 
Israelis was a necessary business decision 
for a project this large and complex. 
The fake street, fake valley, fake 
apartment-display ended in a pleasant sky-
lit lobby, where representatives of the 
Cairo Amman Bank, Arab Islamic Bank, 
and Arab Bank sat in logoed glass cubicles, 
available to discuss financing for future 
purchases. And for the still-skeptical, 
there's a six-minute 3-D movie, where the 
city appears in its completed glory -- a 
place where families picnic, men in 
business dress greet each other amid 
bustling plazas, and fireworks crest over 
soaring apartment towers topped with solar 
panels. The architecture is tasteful. These 
aren't dachas plunked on fake islands off 
the coast of Dubai. It's the kind of place 
where I, or just about anyone in the world 
with middle or even upper-middle class 
aspirations, would want to live. And it 
looked weirdly familiar. 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028713 
The group had a chance to visit with 
Bashar Masri, the Nablus-born founder and 
CEO of Massar International, the 
Palestinian conglomerate financing a third 
of Rawabi. Massar and Qatar Diar, the real 
estate investment arm of the government of 
Qatar's sovereign wealth fund, jointly 
created Bayti Real Estate Investment 
Company -- Palestine to build and market 
Rawabi. But if two-thirds of the project's 
money is coming from Qatar, the vision 
behind Rawabi is Masri's. 
Massar owns a private equity fund that 
invests in Palestinian agriculture and 
natural gas distribution. It runs travel 
agencies in Jordan and brokerage firms in 
Serbia. Massar invests in Harvest Export, 
which sells Palestinian produce to 
consumers in Russia and Western Europe --
as well as in Israel. Two years ago, Masri 
made headlines when he attempted to  
purchase a bankrupt Jewish housing 
development in East Jerusalem. He helped 
create an online trading and brokerage 
platform for Palestine's stock exchange. 
Masri has lived outside of Palestine for 
periods of his life, and is, by all accounts, 
largely untainted by connections to the 
PA's notoriously rent-seeking inner circle. 
He's a trim middle-aged man, smartly-
dressed, friendly and approachable. There 
seemed no more appropriate a place to talk 
to him one-on-one than on a wide terrace 
overlooking the construction site, with 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028714 
hills, valleys, and rising apartment blocks --
the future he was in the process of building 
-- stretched out in front of him. 
"On a good, clear day, you can see Tel 
Aviv, Ashdod, and Ashkelon," he told me. 
"One-third of Palestine and Israel." Rawabi 
is in the second-largest, yet most sparsely-
populated Area A in the West Bank -- from 
the terrace, which faces away from Ateret, 
you can see expanses of mostly-empty 
hills. Perhaps in Masri's mind, they are 
awaiting Rawabis of their own. When I 
returned to Washington, I asked him in a 
phone interview if he viewed his project as 
the first of many such planned cities in 
Palestine. "I always say our success is 
measured not by how many homes we sell. 
It is measured when a second Rawabi is 
established," he told me. 
Standing on the terrace, I asked him if his 
willingness to undertake such a massive 
project reflected any optimism about the 
coming years -- no one invests this much 
time, money, and energy into something if 
they expect war is on the horizon. "This 
project is built for today's politics," he 
replied. "If it gets a little worse, or a little 
better -- fine. If it gets really bad, we're in 
trouble. If it doesn't, then great. We're not 
waiting on a breakthrough." 
He estimated that Israeli obstruction had 
delayed the project by a year and a half 
The bureaucratic inertia could continue: 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028715 
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. 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028716 
"This place is influenced by Reston, 
Virginia," he said -- Masri is a Virginia 
Tech alumnus, and had lived in the 
Washington, DC area earlier in life. It was, 
he said, influenced by planned suburbs 
outside of Cairo. "And it's influenced by 
Modi'in," he added, explaining that the 
site's engineers and designers (who were 
entirely Palestinian, we had been told 
earlier), had traveled to the Israeli city, 
which is built around similar topography, 
for inspiration. 
Palestinians have long understood that a 
western-style standard of living was 
possible in their part of the world. They 
knew that places like Rawabi already 
existed minutes from their own homes, but 
didn't think that the quality of life 
epitomized by hilltop settlements and cities 
in Israel -- places they weren't allowed to 
visit without an official permit from the 
military -- was accessible to them. 
During our phone interview, Masri talked 
about the astonishment that Palestinians 
feel when they visit the construction site. 
"When [Palestinians] come to Rawabi, and 
they go through the showroom and they see 
what we have planned for them, and they 
see it actually being built, they say, 'Wow, 
this can't be for us. This is not for us. This 
is too high of a standard for us because we 
are supposed to live miserably under the 
occupation'. Then they come to the other 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028717 
side of the showroom and see the city being 
built, and reality starts sinking in." 
It's a type of living closely associated with 
the Palestinians' neighbors in Israel. "They 
know very well that just a 20-minute drive 
away, there's a community with a much 
higher standard of living. And that 
community happened to be one 
representing the occupier, quote-unquote 
the 'enemy.' But they would love to live 
like that. And that's why when they come 
to Rawabi some of them don't believe this 
is for them initially. The first thing that 
goes through their mind is that this could 
be for the Israelis." 
But it is for them. Rawabi's significance 
could lie in something more mundane than 
basic issues of sovereignty and control in 
the West Bank. It lies in the common, 
human desire -- powerful on either side of 
the Green Line -- for a comfortable and 
dignified existence. 
In some quarters, this idea of working 
within the present and less-than-ideal 
political and economic framework to 
achieve this goal is nothing short of 
inflammatory. The U.S.-based, anti-peace 
process website Electronic Intifada has 
smeared Masri as an Israeli collaborator, 
and there have been scattered accusations 
that the project actually legitimizes Israeli 
control over the West Bank. 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028718 
Danin says that Masri is faced with a 
difficult balancing act. "On the one hand 
you're denying the occupation, and you're 
saying you do not accept its legitimacy," he 
says. "But that doesn't mean you won't 
work with Israel in order to improve the 
Palestinian situation with the goal of 
removing the occupation. That's a difficult 
message to convey successfully." 
Masri rejects the notion that he abetting a 
problematic status quo. "The vast majority 
of Palestinians understand and know 
reality," he said. "There is no home in 
Palestine without Israeli cement and parts. 
Every construction project in Palestine 
must have components from Israel. So it's 
not like I'm doing something different." 
Of course, he doesn't like that Israel has so 
much control over Palestinian imports, and 
the West Bank economy in general. "This 
is the occupation," he said. "I'm not happy 
about that and that's why we strive for a 
state of our own." But he likened 
boycotting Israeli products to boycotting 
products from the United Kingdom, the 
United States, or other countries supportive 
of Israel -- something he wouldn't consider. 
The only people he won't buy from are the 
West Bank settlers. 
Luckily, Masri's vision has the backing of a 
powerful regional government -- one that 
does not officially recognize Israel, and 
whose actions have often had the effect of 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028719 
strengthening some of the Jewish State's 
sworn enemies. 
The Gulf kingdom of Qatar has done more 
than simply buy into the Rawabi paradigm: 
It's also funding two-thirds of the project, 
to the tune of over $600 million. This is 
enough money to single-handedly finance 
the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority 
-- which is effectively broke, thanks to 
penalties imposed by the Israeli and U.S. 
governments after Mahmoud Abbas's 
successful push for a U.N. General 
Assembly vote on Palestinian U.N. 
membership, and a freeze in financial aid 
from Gulf State donors, most notably Saudi 
Arabia -- for the better part of a year. 
Instead, the Qataris have not only bypassed 
the PA, but channeled money into a project 
that seems to prove the PA's uselessness. 
"It's like an island inside the traditional 
infrastructure of the PA," says Jonathan 
Schanzer, vice president of research at the 
Foundation for Defense of Democracies 
and author of a book on Palestinian internal 
politics. "It shows everyone what you can 
do if you don't go through the PA. The PA 
receives $600 million a year [in foreign 
aid] and they have not done something like 
this." 
Masri says that the leadership of the PA has 
been fully supportive, but that Rawabi has 
been hurt by the Palestinian government's 
lack of capacity. "We should not be 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028720 
building public schools. We should not be 
building a waste water treatment plant or 
waste water networks or water reservoirs," 
he told me. "Unfortunately we have to do 
that because the Palestinian Authority does 
not have the funding and the donors let [the 
PA] down." 
There might be a political calculation 
behind Qatar's decision to throw an amount 
of money equivalent to two years of U.S.  
financial aid to the PA behind a single 
private-sector figure like Masri. Qatar 
recently announced plans to invest nearly  
$400 million in the Hamas-controlled Gaza 
Strip, and in October of 2012, Qatari Emir 
Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani 
became the first head of state to visit the  
Strip  after the Islamist militant group's 
2007 takeover. Hamas politburo chief 
Khaled Meshaal lives in Doha, and Qatar 
Diar is financing a major development in  
Sudan, whose cash-strapped government 
enjoys close relations with Iran, and has 
facilitated the transfer of long-range 
rockets to Hamas. In short, Qatar supports 
an E.U. and U.S. listed terrorist 
organization bitterly opposed to both Israel 
and the current PA leadership. And it also 
has no problem investing in Rawabi. 
According to Kamran Bokhari, vice 
president of Middle Eastern and South 
Asian affairs for Stratfor, Qatari support for 
Hamas is part of the sheikhdom's larger, 
post-Arab Spring strategy of siding with 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028721 
the Middle East's Islamists, and specifically 
the Muslim brotherhood, whom the Qataris 
view as the region's rising power. "The 
Qatari strategy is that the situation has 
changed, and we need to fend for ourselves 
and ensure that the regional anarchy is not 
going to impact us," says Bokhari. The 
Qatari investment in Rawabi -- which feeds 
an $85 million investment in the Israeli 
economy, and which could not have 
happened without some degree of official 
Israeli approval -- is an example of this 
larger geopolitical strategy, which is driven 
more by perceived self-interest than by an 
ideological affinity for political Islam. 
"Investments in the region are about the 
return on political influence," adds Gregory 
Gause, a professor at the University of 
Vermont and a non-resident senior fellow 
at the Brookings Institution-Doha. He 
noted the presence of a large American 
airbase in Qatar, and the country's close 
relations with the United States. 
In the Palestinian territories, as in the 
broader region, the Qataris are supporting 
secular and religious forces in a way that 
will maximize their influence and keep the 
regional balance as favorable for them as 
possible. In a sense, the same strategic 
calculus that convinces Qatar to support 
Hamas allows them to cooperate with Israel 
and the West Bank private sector as well. 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028722 
"I think Qatar is going by the ground 
reality," says Bokhari. "Fatah, the ruling 
faction of the PA, is essentially tanking. It's 
really in a state of decline because of 
corruption and charges of embezzlement. 
It's got an aging leadership. There's no 
dynamism left in the group. There's a lot of 
factionalism. It's almost like an oligarchy." 
Rawabi could be Qatar's way of 
encouraging the currently-calm status quo 
in the West Bank, but without obviously 
upgrading their ties to Israel, or throwing 
their money behind a political 
establishment that they don't fully trust. 
"On one end they need to make sure Fatah 
does not completely collapse or weaken to 
the point where they're no longer coherent," 
says Bokhari, "and Hamas needs to be 
shaped and contained and shepherded in a 
way that it doesn't grow into anything 
larger." 
Though there are politics underlying 
Qatar's investment in Rawabi, it is still, 
inevitably, a financial decision. "You have 
serious people who have a lot at risk here," 
Danin says. "Their goal is not primarily to 
make a political point. Their goal is to 
recoup their investment and make some 
money." Even resource-rich Qatar, which 
wants to diversity its holdings in order to 
hedge against long-term shifts in the oil 
and natural gas market, cares whether its 
investment choices pay off 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028723 
Danin believes that Rawabi's Palestinian 
and Qatari investors made a wise decision. 
Housing in Ramallah is expensive, and 
Danin says that there is a sizable and 
highly-educated Palestinian middle class in 
need of an alternative to the West Bank's 
de-facto capital. He expressed little doubt 
when I asked him if the West Bank 
economy could support Rawabi. "This is a 
Palestinian national project," he said. "It is 
the best of what is possible in that it's 
private sector-led, and it's profit-making 
led." 
And it has supporters in high places. When 
President Barack Obama met with Israeli 
officials in Washington in September of 
2010, Rawabi was on the agenda. 
From one perspective, Rawabi is a historic 
investment in Palestine, as well as an 
unusually open point of cooperation 
between Israel and an Arab government. It 
could improve the lives of Palestinians, 
while convincing Israelis that they have 
nothing to fear from their neighbors' 
prosperity. But any attempts to change 
the status quo in the West Bank are fraught 
with difficulties. 
There's Israeli bureaucracy to overcome. 
"In Israel, if the Minister of Defense says I 
want something, it's not that the system 
thwarts it. But the system is so 
decentralized that ultimately it takes a lot 
of steps to get it translated into action," 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028724 
says Danin. Israeli officials are positively 
disposed towards Rawabi, but it's still taken 
years to resolve sovereignty and 
governance issues around necessities like 
water, and a single access road. Such 
Israeli inertia was apparently at the heart of 
Obama's concerns back in 2010, and 
sources say that the president has discussed 
the issue of the access road with Israeli 
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on 
multiple occasions. 
Back in Washington, I asked Masri if he 
believed the Israelis understood the 
potential importance of Rawabi. "I really 
don't know," he said. "Their statements are 
neutral to positive. But their actions are 
neutral to negative." 
And then there's the larger inertia. What 
meaning does a place like Rawabi have if it 
sits in the middle of a still-unresolved 
conflict, or if Palestinian economic self-
improvement stands in contrast to an all-
pervading political stasis -- or even 
political backsliding? Today, Rawabi is 
significant because of its novelty. But if 
there's a breakthrough in the Israeli-
Palestinian peace process, perhaps enabled 
by a growing West Bank economy and a 
permanent end in terrorism, it could take on 
an importance much larger than itself 
On the drive out of the valley, where the 
highway swerves past the pillbox with the 
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028725 
beaten Israeli flag and past the turnoff for 
Ateret, the picture is still mixed. 
Armin Rosen writes for and produces The 
Atlantic's International Channel. 
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