Dead Sea Spa Resort, Jordan — Jan 23, 2026
It’s 6 o’clock in the morning and I’m in a room overlooking the pitch-black Dead Sea, the only body of water on earth more salty and inhospitable than Lake Periphery. The hotel I’m staying at was advertised as a spa, but it is virtually abandoned, manned only by a kind little man who cannot understand why we didn’t just fly into Tel Aviv if our goal is to enter the Palestinian territories unscathed.
Our fixer, an Arabic-speaking Irishman named Ainle O Caireallain, explained to him that flying into Israel and engaging with their internal customs process comes with a risk. Foreigners are summarily detained for questioning, of course, Googled, if a customs agent senses they are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. One whiff of solidarity comes with an immediate deportation order and a five-year ban from the Holy Land. Obviously, I haven’t gone particularly ape shit with Palestine content like Hasan Piker or Medhi Hasan have, but we did once send a correspondent to interview a Hezbollah commander in Lebanon. Ainle felt like the Israelis would send me back to LAX in a heartbeat if they caught wind of that, or watched any of my interviews with Professor Galvin.
Additionally, Ainle is the co-founder of a youth boxing gym called the Lajee Center, which is physically inside of a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank. Oh, and his brother is one of the founding members of Kneecap, an Irish rap trio that has openly called for the execution of Benjamin Netanyahu.
“So here’s the craic, lads,” Ainle explained earlier. “The fuckin’ long way is the only way in, and that’s the long way through Jordan. It takes about six hours to travel what used to be a fifteen minute drive before the occupation. There’s two Jordanian checkpoints, two Israeli ones, and then you pop out in Jericho.”
From there, our plan was to catch a taxi to Aida Refugee Camp, where a mid-sized apartment was set up to accommodate us for a week. Despite the ‘long way’ still having two manned Israeli checkpoints, Ainle said the level of questioning would be much lighter than at the airport. This, he said, was partially due to the fact that a vast majority of the daily foot traffic comes from Palestinian nationals, who’ve been forbidden from entering Israel since October 7. The Jordanian border is their only way in-and-out of their own country. President Mohammed Abbas included.
Oh, and it’s only open four hours per day, from 8 a.m. to noon.
We’re all supposed to meet in the lobby in forty-five minutes to head to the first checkpoint. For some reason, I can’t sleep. As a child, I suffered from a condition called Clinophobia, which is an intense fear of falling asleep. This likely stemmed from my unfortunate habit of reading the full wikipedia pages of serial killers like Albert Fish and John Wayne Gacy just hours before bed. I became convinced that if I knocked out, freaks would crawl through my bedroom window and execute me. That’s not exactly what’s going on now, but I am a little scared of being in Palestine as an American.
To distract myself from these concerns, I just ordered room service from a hotel phone that was definitely manufactured in the late nineties. The phone set is a shiny beige color, like the pencil sharpeners from my elementary school. I'm honestly surprised anyone picked up, but this Middle East is full of surprises, I guess.
"Club sandwich," I told the voice on the other end. "And a burger. Beef cheese-burger. And orange juice. And water. Oh, and a coffee."
"Three beverages, sir?"
"Three beverages."
I pulled out a notepad from my backpack and began writing down some of my interview goals for this upcoming shoot. As always, it’s important to me that our coverage sticks out from the rest. But how? In the recent memory of most Americans, Gaza is Palestine. But the West Bank is the larger territory—three million people, and 670,000 Israeli settlers who've violated international law to build segregated compounds on land that isn't theirs. Aside from the Gaza Genocide, settler violence has been the second-largest story coming from Palestine. Louis Theroux made a whole documentary about it. So did George Chidi’s ‘The Guardian,’ NYTimes, Vice, and a plethora of other outlets. There’s no doubt that it’s an important story to tell, but I need a fresh angle here. Otherwise we’ll fall into the slop bucket with everyone else. And probably banned from YouTube.
So here’s what I’m thinking, for an angle --
A little over a week ago, Trump unveiled his “Board Of Peace”—a Western-backed committee that's supposed to govern Gaza through something called the NCAG, the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, as they gradually move to disempower Hamas through a twelve-point replacement plan. And who's running the NCAG? Ali Shaath, a longtime mouthpiece of a governing body called the Palestinian Authority, or PA.
The PA controls the West Bank—they're the suits, the diplomats, the guys who shake hands and sign papers while Hamas fires rockets. And now a PA guy is being installed to run Gaza too. This will ultimately render the Palestinian Authority as the sole political representative of the Palestinian people – controlling both the West Bank and Gaza.
So my question – which will govern this documentary – is simple: do they have what it takes? Will the Palestinian Authority be able to shepherd their people into statehood and self-determination? Will their anti-Hamas, nonviolent stance allow for future, good faith negotiations with Israel once Trump’s ‘peace plan’ is through? Or are they just a proxy of the occupation and a clever decoy, propped up by the architects of the Greater Israel project?
I guess we’ll see. My club sandwich and burger is here. Wish me luck!
AC