The tents appear on a Tuesday. Two at first—military-surplus style—pitched on the hilltop above a bedouin village, populated by Palestinians who’ve lived there for over four hundred years. By Thursday there’s a flag flapping in the wind and the low whine and sputter of a gas generator. The flag is purple, with white Hebrew script that reads “God Is King,” officially marking the land as territory of Hilltop Youth, or as they call themselves – No’ar HaGva’ot.
They come down from the hill at night: sun-kissed teenagers with strange haircuts. The tops of their skulls are shaved bald and covered by wide yarmulkes, while Hashem has permitted their sideburns to grow wild, unkempt and greasy. Villagers arise from their slumber in a panic as the low whine of their ATV fleet grows closer. An electric scream that means war. Fathers begin barricading their doors with bookshelves, moving livestock indoors and hiding their wives in storage closets as confused children shriek in terror.
The symphony of engines abruptly comes to a halt. The moonlit silence is then filled with the crackling of tires and faint whispering in Hebrew. Then come the screams, slurs hurled by ghouls with brown eyes full of hatred, who are throwing rocks into the open windows of occupied homes as they storm through the village with knives, guns, slingshots and baseball bats, demanding that villagers come out and face them. Contrary to how these hooligans are presenting themselves, they aren’t really there to kill. Their goal is to incite a reaction.
Any ounce of retaliation from the villagers will result in a ‘call for backup,’ made by Hilltop Youth to the Israeli Army, who have a special unit called Desert Frontier, tasked with providing 24/7 assistance to ultraviolent settlers in the West Bank. The unit was established by Israel’s Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who I personally believe to be the most despicable, sickening human being on the face of the planet, perhaps deserving of a worse fate than Bourdain intended for Henry Kissinger. Ben-Gvir has personally provided gun licenses and firearms to 18 different illegal outpost settlements since October 7th and has since promised total legal amnesty to Hilltop Youth, who he describes as “sweet kids” taking back ancestral land that is rightfully theirs.
Of course, one of the villagers always retaliates. Maybe it’s a child throwing a stone at the settler who cut the eyes out of his favorite lamb while he was at school. Or a grandmother shoo’ing one of them out her doorway with a broom, lightly grazing their shoulder with straw bristles in a manner that verges on impolite. Immediately, the settlers will scamper back up and sit in silence until their Israeli backup comes. Sometimes, it takes less than thirty minutes. The whole thing reeks of coordination.
Bulletproof green humvees roll in. Sometimes even tanks, emblazoned with Israeli flags and packed to the brim with trigger-happy soldiers holding M16 rifles. They jump out, one screaming into a long range acoustic device – or LRAD, a directional megaphone currently being used by I.C.E. in Minneapolis – demanding that all Palestinians vacate their homes for interrogation. Apparently, there’s been an assault committed in the area against an innocent Israeli citizen – a hate crime, rather, carried out by a terrorist who hates jews. As the villagers emerge from hiding, some recognize individual soldiers from previous raids and begin taunting them by name. One soldier is literally an attacker from earlier who changed outfits. The choreography would be laughable if not ruined by the context of a genocidal apartheid-state.
Within minutes, villagers are being ziptied, stepped on, and loaded into paddywagons for interrogation. Under Israeli Military Law in ‘Area C’ zones of the West Bank, Palestinians are stripped of all ‘rights’ the moment an individual Israeli soldier declares them to be suspicious, which doesn’t require any basis in reality. In this case, every villager is a suspicious, possible-terrorist, Hamas sleeper cell agent who dreams of detonating themselves to bits under the pulse of techno drums in one of Tel Aviv’s premiere gay bars.
The villagers are taken to a local jail and held in a cell for as long as it takes for their community to be flattened. Settlers are invited to loot the village before Israeli bulldozers reduce their homes to rubble. When the Palestinians are finally released – a process that can take months – they begin the process of making their way home, often walking for days to where their village once was. What they discover upon returning home is shocking. Electrified, razor-wire fences and military checkpoints set up on all roads leading to the village. The cruel soldiers who man these posts have only two words for Arabs: Israelis only.
Beneath their sadness, the villagers are somewhat amused at what is being illegally built overtop the skeleton of their community. A ‘luxury’ settlement that resembles a retirement community in Florida – a little splice of boxy, prefabbed suburbia in the heart of Palestine, complete with a mini-golf course, basketball court, synagogue, grocery store, and separate roads leading in-and-out of Israel. Nuclear families in minivans arrive, blowing through the checkpoint without even glancing over at the soldiers, ecstatic to begin their new chapter above international law.
The villagers scatter in misery, mourning the loss of their livestock, family heirlooms and community. Some, particularly the elders, die alone in nearby caves. The young often make their way to Hebron or Ramallah, building a new life elsewhere under Israeli occupation. The Hilltop Youth have long since moved to another hilltop. The cycle repeats.
Hell is a place in Palestine.
Checkpoint 4, King Hussein Bridge International Border Crossing, Palestine — January 24, 2026
Things were doomed from the start. Our Irish fixer, Ainle – older brother of Kneecap’s Moglai Bap – was just turned away at the border and banned from both Israel and Palestine for five years.
I’ve never felt worse for someone at the hands of a customs enforcement agent, and this is coming from someone who has spent time in a C.B.P. detention center and watched thousands of devastated migrants being processed by robotic jarheads at the peak of 2023’s border surge. I say that simply because of how close Ainle was to the finish line.
Let me explain ...
When you cross into the West Bank from Jordan, you pass through a series of five checkpoints, each of which takes over an hour and are separate dimensions of purgatory. The first checkpoint is over King Hussein Bridge, which is a Jordanian shakedown. Just a bunch of fat guys screaming in Arabic and attempting to coax you into paying a grand for a ‘VIP Service’ that assigns you an armed guard for the sole purpose of line-cutting. The second Jordanian checkpoint is a duplicate of the first. From there, free commuter buses to the first Israeli checkpoint, which is an item screening and I.D. check, quite similar to the TSA experience at American airports.
The final Israeli checkpoint, which is around a quarter mile walk from the first, is an intensively interrogative experience. Travelers are made to separate into three lines: Israelis, Palestinians, and foreigners. The Israeli line is chronically empty. No Israeli citizen in their right mind would cross this way. There are 24 international border crossings into Israel and three major airports in the country, all of which are accessible to them around-the-clock. The King Hussein Bridge crossing, cutely renamed the Allenby Crossing – in reference to the colonizer in control of Palestine during the British Mandate – is the only crossing Palestinians are allowed to use to go in-and-out of the West Bank and only open for four hours each day.
These factors made our three-man team – two Americans and one Irishman – quite suspicious in the eyes of the gruff border agent manning the foreigner line.
“So if you’re going to party in Tel Aviv, why the hell are you coming in through Jordan?,” the agent asked Liam, our field producer. I waited nervously in the queue behind him.
Our decoy story was that we were young Jewish guys trying to party and find girlfriends in Israel, since American antisemitism was making the domestic dating scene a total nightmare.
“Well,” Liam said, veering a bit off-script. “I just really wanted to see the Dead Sea first, and read that it's a lot safer to access from Jordan. We didn't want to have to go through Palestine to reach the water. It didn't seem safe."
"But you're entering Palestine right now."
"What?"
"Yes," the agent said, looking at Liam with a discerning glare. Bad vibes.
The agent fumbled nervously with his computer system, probably plugging Liam’s full name into the most advanced surveillance database on earth. I ground my teeth nervously, thinking of all the red flags that could pop up in his digital footprint. Coke memes. Possible watermelon emojis on an Instagram story from last year. Who knows.
Suddenly, the agent stamped Liam's passport and let him through. Apparently, all he had to say was that Jewish. Worked like a charm. I was next.
“Are you with Liam, sir?,” the asked. I replied affirmatively.
“Alright, enjoy Israel!," he replied. Passport stamped. Easy peasy.
Ainle was in line behind me and had been avoiding eye contact with all of us during the queue process. This was because his name was already flagged in the system. He is married to a Palestinian woman and their marriage was officiated within the Palestinian territories. This would make a Tel Aviv, party-boy alibi totally unbelievable. We had to pretend that he wasn't with us.
Watching Ainle haggle with the border agent from the outfield was a sorry sight.
“I’m going to visit my wife in Bethlehem,” he explained to the guard, while presenting the officer with his printed marriage certificate. “We are lawfully married and I’m going to surprise her at Aida Refugee Camp."
"Your wife lives in a refugee camp?"
"It was a camp in 1948," Ainle explained. "It's since been built up into a normal neighborhood."
He may as well have been speaking Klingon. The notion that any European person would voluntarily be married to a Palestinian Arab – an ethnicity which many within Israeli society believe are either genetically subhuman or culturally cancerous – was unfathomable. A sign of low moral character. Ainle didn’t stand a chance.
He was coldly turned away and given an Israeli court date in 2031 to appeal their decision.
I will miss him. Navigating this whole experience without a bilingual fixer for the next two weeks will be a difficult experience. Adaptability is the name of the game, though. We are currently waiting on a taxi to take us from the checkpoint to Aida Camp, where some locals have arranged an apartment for us.
It's hard to believe that we are less than a ten minute drive from where the day began. All-in-all, it took 6 hours and 48 minutes to cross from Jordan into Palestine.
But we're here. Wish me luck.
AC