Ramallah, Palestine — January 26, 2026
I'm sitting across from Brigadier General Anwar Rajab in a Nike sweatshirt, trying not to shit myself.
He is speaking relatively angry Arabic, apparently making direct demands of the Israeli government. Stop the settlements! Hands off Hebron! Despite nodding along, the only conflict I’m currently concerned with is the one unfolding in my gastrointestinal tract.
I’ve always thought of myself as a worldly, iron-gutted, street meat soldier. The kind of guy to chug tap water in Tijuana or eat sliced lamb from a fly-covered kebab spinner without hesitation. This morning, though, I met my match. It was a chicken mayonnaise sandwich from a spot called Marvel Restaurant in Bethlehem, just a few blocks away from the refugee camp. Seemed innocuous enough – dry, shredded chicken slathered with lukewarm mayo, pressed into a grilled panini.
Six bites later, I was projectile vomiting into an alleyway just a stones throw from where Jesus was baptized and begging my sweet savior for an ounce of relief. In my view, there’s nothing more infantilizing and genuinely terrifying than the rapid onset of food poisoning symptoms – except maybe peaking on bad drugs at a shitty concert. Pure terror and a nauseous guessing game of how many pukes it’ll take to expel the demons.
Upon hobbling to the refugee camp and collapsing at our makeshift apartment, our Palestinian fixers noticed my condition and immediately, without any sort of pretext, asked if I’d just gone to Marvel Restaurant and made the – apparently – grave mistake of ordering a chicken mayonnaise panini from Abdul. Camp lore was that a single bite of that Allah-forsaken menu item would render even the strongest resistance fighter bed-ridden and useless for a standard business week.
“Brother,” one fixer said. “This is no good. You will likely feel bad for four days.”
Four days? That was exactly how long we had left on the shoot schedule. I shot a look at my concerned producers, who could see the writing on the wall. I was in no shape to pull off high-pressure, apartheid-state interviews in this state. Yet we had full production arrangements in place for Tulkarm Refugee Camp and on the streets of East Jerusalem. Call to Prayer echoed through the apartment, seeping in through the open windows as tension hung in the air.
“Alright,” I said, addressing my production team and our fixers. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to pull this whole shoot off. But we can’t botch the Anwar Rajab interview. He’s basically the fucking leader of the armed wing of the Palestinian Authority. A ton of work went into setting this up and I don’t want to let people down.”
Off we went to the headquarters of the Palestinian Security Forces, which is a makeshift tan building in Ramallah that resembles a two-story dentist's office in Albuquerque. Despite sweating bullets in the backseat of our rented minivan, the puking had stopped and I seemed able to form a complete sentence like I’d been able to do in the good ol’ days before Marvel Restaurant. That would do. There was no backing out. Anwar Rajab is a hard get – a guy who has never been interviewed by Western media and will likely be the commander of whatever Palestinian “state” exists after Hamas’ disarmament is complete.
For context, Trump has thrown together an international committee he's named the "Board of Peace," peace being the word they're using for what happens to the flattened Gaza strip once Hamas is out of the picture. Our senile baby-king initially offered countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia board ‘positions’ for a $1 billion fee before appointing Jared Kushner, Tony Blair and Steve Witkoff to leadership roles. The only Palestinian representation within the Board of Peace is through a U.N.-mandated transitional body called the NCAG – National Committee for the Administration of Gaza.
The man running the NCAG, Ali Shaath, is a PA guy, which means the Palestinian Authority. They control certain sections of the West Bank, mostly hate Hamas, and have been totally ineffective in stopping the construction of illegal Israeli settlements. Additionally, they’ve also worked with Mossad in the IDF to squash various resistance groups within the West Bank who dare to resist the forced displacement of their villages or refugee camps. One such example was in the Jenin Refugee Camp, once home to over 25,000 Palestinians. Last year, the Israeli army decided to ‘clear out’ the camp for no apparent reason. In response, a group of teenagers from the camp – dubbing themselves the ‘Jenin Brigades’ – took up arms and refused to leave their homes. The PA and Israelis teamed up to kill and/or arrest them. Locals report seeing PA officers arrest Jenin ‘dissidents,’ load them into unmarked vans and transfer them directly over to Israeli detention, where prisoners have reported horrific torture and abuse at the hands of ‘48’ prison guards.
So who worked with Israel to shut down the Jenin Brigades? Bingo! My man Anwar Rajab, major general of the Palestinian Security Forces – which is the armed wing of Palestinian Authority. With Hamas likely out of the picture in the coming years, he’ll be the military leader of whatever remains of the Palestinian sovereignty movement.
His office was lavish. Tam walls brandished with gold medals, cut-out decals of Yasser Arafat and flashy mementos from his Second Intifada. We waited in folding chairs as his translator patiently questioned us about our interview aims. As I explained to him, the central question of my report is simple: how will Palestinians achieve statehood in the absence of an armed resistance and what will the Palestinian Authority do to stop illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank?
Rajab offered every prepared response you’d probably imagine.
“We can’t ever respond with violence,” he said. “That is exactly what Ben-Gvir and Smotrich want us to do. They’re weaponizing these settlers to try and elicit a response. If we respond with violence, they use it to justify more force. We refuse to play their game.”
I pushed further, escalating a hypothetical to get to see how far he’d go.
“Ok. So let’s say that armed settlers occupied every single city and town in the entire West Bank except for a single village,” I said. “And that was the final Palestinian territory on earth. Would you take up arms to defend the final village?”
“No,” Rajab said, without an ounce of humility. “That’s what the occupation wants and we can't give it to them.”
Holy shit. What the occupation actually wants is to kill Rajab and all of his homies. Less than a day prior, Israeli National Security Minister Ben-Gvir called for the assassination of all senior P.A. officials and the total disarmament of their security forces.
It was hard to tell if Rajab was so beaten down by Israeli military might that he was capitulating out of fear, or if he was an actual asset of the occupation.
Either way, I think this situation is doomed and I feel like shit. We got some good footage, but I'm tired. Going back to Lake Periphery. Hopefully we shot enough.
AC