My father collects 100-year-old magazines about Palestine—Life, National Geographic, even The Illustrated London News, the world’s first graphic weekly news magazine. For years, he would talk about these mysterious documents but rarely show them to anyone. “I have proof,” he would say, “that Palestine exists.”

His father, my paternal grandfather, whom I called Siddi, had a similar compulsion to prove his heritage, though it manifested differently. Siddi used to randomly recite his family tree to my father when he was a child. As if answering a question that had not been asked, he would recount those who came before him: “First there was Hassan,” he would say in his thick Arabic accent, “and then there was Simri.” Following fathers and sons down the line of paternity, in a rhythm much like that of a prayer, he told the story of 11 generations. Every generation until my father’s was born and raised in Ramallah, Palestine.

After 1948, however, almost our entire family in Ramallah moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. Although my American-born father didn’t inherit Siddi’s habit of reciting his family tree, he did recite facts; he lectured me about Palestine ad nauseam in my youth, although he had not yet visited. Similar to his father’s, these speeches were unprompted. “Your Siddi only had one business partner his entire life,” he would say for the hundredth time. “And that business partner was a rabbi. Palestinians are getting pitted against the Jews because it’s convenient, but it’s not the truth.”

His lectures were tedious, repetitive, and often fueled with so much passion that they overwhelmed me into silence. And yet they took up permanent residence in my brain, and I would reach for them when pressed to give political opinions after new acquaintances found out I was Palestinian. “So what do the Palestinians even want?” a co-worker’s husband once asked me as we waited in line for the bar at my company’s holiday party. I said what I imagined my father would have said in the face of such dismissiveness: “The right to live on their land in peace.”

But sometime after the luster of young adulthood wore off, I found my piecemeal understanding of Palestinian history—what I’d gleaned from passively listening to my father—no longer sufficient when navigating these conversations. When a man I was on a date with learned where my olive skin and dark hair came from, he told me that Palestinians “were invented,” even though I was sitting right in front of him, sharing a bowl of guacamole. I left furious, mostly at myself. I had nothing thoughtful to say to prove otherwise.

Like my father, I started collecting my own box of scraps about Palestine, although I couldn’t have said why. Perhaps I wanted to slice through a conversation just as others had sliced through my existence, but not even this was clear to me yet. Magazines, books, old posters, and stickers found a home in a corner of my bedroom. My collecting was an obsession. I’d buy books by Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, and Mourid Barghouti, not necessarily because I knew who these men were at the time, but because the word Palestine was right there, embossed on the cover.

At first I didn’t dare open these books. They became an homage to my identity that I both eagerly honored and wanted to ignore. My eventual engagement with the material was slow, deliberate. I wanted to preserve a semblance of ease that I feared I would lose once I learned more about my people’s history. I bookmarked articles on Palestine in my browser, creating a haphazard folder of links that included infographics on Palestine’s olive-oil industry, news clippings about the latest Israeli laws that discriminated against Palestinians, and articles on JSTOR with provocative titles like “Myths About Palestinians.” I was building an archive as if I were putting together an earthquake kit—like the ones my parents kept in our basement in San Francisco—even though I didn’t know when this particular survival kit would be useful or necessary.  

But my father knew. His father knew. Our liberation may eventually hang on these various archives.

Even more true: These archives validate Palestinians’ existence.  

In the 19th century, before a wave of European Jews settled in Palestine following the Holocaust, early Zionists leaned on the mythology that the land was empty and barren. The movement advocated for the return of Jews to their ancestral homeland. In 1901, the Zionist author Israel Zangwill wrote in the British monthly periodical The New Liberal Review that Palestine was “a country without people; the Jews are a people without a country.”

In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was quoted in The Sunday Times of London: “[There is] no such thing as Palestinians … It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” This idea has been similarly reused for more than a century, evolving very little. As recently as February 2024, Israeli Minister of Settlement and National Missions Orit Strock repeated the sentiment during a meeting of Israel’s Parliament, saying, “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people.”

But this fiction of Palestinians’ nonexistence feels tired. It’s a distraction that not only invalidates us but also places Palestinians on the defensive while Israel’s government builds walls and expands illegal settlements that separate Israelis from their very real Palestinian neighbors.

It feels especially absurd in the face of Israel’s latest military campaign in Gaza, launched in response to Hamas’s attacks on October 7. Since then, Israeli strikes have killed more than 34,000 people, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, although that number is incomplete. It does not include all of the civilians who have died from hunger, disease, or lack of medical treatment. If Palestinians don’t exist, then who is dying? I fear that Strock’s words may become true, that Palestinians soon will not exist, that slowly they will become extinct. It’s a cruel self-fulfilling prophecy—claim that Palestinians were never there, and do away with them when they continue to prove otherwise.

While listening to my father’s monologues, I used to think about how exhausting it must be for him to keep reminding himself that the place where his father was born is real. At the time, I didn’t think about my place in this heartbreak. But I can’t ignore that heartbreak any longer.

Since October, I’ve returned to my own little box on Palestine. I used to think that this haphazard archive lacked direction, but I see it differently now. This collection proves to me that the place where my great-grandfather owned orchards and grew oranges was real, that the land Siddi was forced to leave behind was a blooming desert before others claimed its harvest. It’s also a catalog of my own awakening, a coming to terms with a history that I didn’t want to know. My ignorance is shattered over and over again when I look through this box and think about all that we are losing today.

Gaza is considered one of the oldest continuously inhabited areas in the world; some of its monuments date back to Byzantine, Greek, and Islamic times. Since the October 7 attacks, however, Israel’s air raids on Gaza have demolished or damaged roughly 200 historical sites, including libraries, hundreds of mosques, a harbor dating back to 800 B.C.E., and one of the oldest Christian monasteries in the world. In December, an Israeli strike destroyed the Omari Mosque, the oldest and largest mosque in Gaza City, which housed dozens of rare ancient manuscripts. Israeli strikes have endangered Gaza’s remaining Christian population, considered one of the oldest in the world, and have destroyed every university while killing more than 90 prominent academics.

The destruction of cultural heritage is not new in the history of war. Perhaps that’s why when my father came across a tattered hardcover titled Village Life in Palestine, a detailed account of life in the Holy Land in the late 1800s, in a used-book store in Cork, Ireland, he immediately purchased it. He knew that books like these were sacred artifacts that hold a truth—a proof of existence outside political narratives. My father’s copy was printed by the London publishing company Longmans, Green, and Co. in 1905. The first few pages of the book contain a library record and a stamp that reads CANCELLED. Below is another stamp with the date: March 9, 1948. I’m not sure if that date—mere months before the creation of Israel—signifies when it was pulled out of circulation, or the last time it was checked out. But the word cancelled feels purposeful. It feels like another act of erasure, a link between my father’s collection and the growing list of historical sites in Gaza now destroyed. We are losing our history and, with that, the very record of those who came before us.

After I started my own collection on Palestine, my father entrusted me with some of his scanned copies of Life that mention Palestine. He waited to show them to me, as if passing on an heirloom. Perhaps he wanted to be sure I was ready or that I could do something with them. One of the magazines dates back to May 10, 1948, four days before the creation of Israel. There’s a headline that reads, “The Captured Port of Haifa Is Key to the Jews’ Strategy.” The author goes on to write that the port “improved Jews’ strategic position in Palestine. It gave them complete control of a long coastal strip south to Tel Aviv … They could look forward to shipments of heavy military equipment from their busy supporters abroad.” Right next to this text is a picture of Palestinian refugees with the caption “Arab Refugees, crammed aboard a British lighter in the harbor at Haifa, wait to be ferried across the bay to the Arab-held city of Acre. They were permitted to take what possessions they could but were stripped of all weapons.”

I can’t help but feel the echo of this history today. I think about President Joe Biden’s plans to build a temporary port in Gaza to allow humanitarian aid in, even though about 7,000 aid trucks stand ready in Egypt’s North Sinai province. Back in October, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to welcome the idea of letting help arrive by sea,which at first confused me because not only has he denied that Palestinians are starving, but his government has also been accused by the United Nations and other humanitarian groups of blocking aid trucks from entering Gaza (a claim that Israel denies). Nevertheless, the historical echo seems quite clear to me now as I look through my father’s magazine and see refugees leaving by port 75 years earlier.

I believe my father didn’t want to be alone in his recordkeeping. Who would? It’s endlessly depressing to have to write yourself and your people into existence. But writing about Palestine no longer feels like a choice. It feels like a compulsion. It’s the same drive that I imagine led Siddi to recite his family tree over and over, a self-preservation method that reminded him, just as much as it reminded his young son, of where they came from. It’s the same compulsion that inspires my father to collect the rubble of history and build a library from it.

This impulse is reactive, yes, a response to the repeated denial of Palestine’s existence, but it’s also an act of faith—faith that one day all of this work will be useful, will finally be put on display as part of a new archive that corrects a systematically denied history. Sometimes I hear my father say that his magazines and books will one day be in a museum about Palestine.

“Your brother will open one, and these will be there,” he muses to himself.

Just as the compulsion to archive is contagious, so is hope. Since I’ve started publishing articles and essays about Palestine, I’ve had close and distant relatives reach out to me and offer to share pieces from their own collections.

They ship me large boxes of books and newspapers, packed up from the recesses of their parents’ homes. “Can you do something with these?” they ask. My answer is always yes. I’m realizing that this archiving is not only work I have to do, but something I get to do.

In the middle of the night, my father sends me subjectless emails with links to articles or scanned copies of magazines about Palestine that he’s been waiting to show to someone, anyone, who will care. I save each email in a folder in my Gmail account labeled “Palestine”—a digital version of the box in my bedroom, an archive that I return to whenever I feel despair.

“It’s all here,” my father writes. “We existed. We were there.”

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A new abortion ban in Florida has providers scrambling—and pregnant women reassessing their options. But the law has implications well beyond the Sunshine State. More after these four new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump’s contempt knows no bounds. How Daniel Radcliffe outran Harry Potter Those who teach free speech need to practice it, Will Creeley argues. Are white women better now?

Losing an Access Point

After two years of reporting on abortion for The Atlantic, I’ve noticed that providers and clinic administrators are usually pretty eager to talk with me. They’re happy to help demystify their work, or to explain how they’re responding to new developments in the legal system.

Not this week. Over the past two days, when I’ve reached out to providers and clinic staff across Florida, almost none of them had time for an interview. They were far too busy, they told me via email or harried phone call, treating and triaging an overwhelming number of patients trying to obtain an abortion before tomorrow’s new six-week cutoff takes effect.

Florida clinics have plastered warnings about the new ban across their websites for a while now: By May 1, in accordance with state law, abortions after six weeks will be prohibited, with exceptions included for rape and incest (which, in practice, are not often granted). Until now, abortions under 15 weeks have been legal in Florida, and since the fall of Roe v. Wade, the state has served as a kind of haven for women seeking the procedure from nearby states with stricter laws. More than 9,000 people traveled to Florida to obtain an abortion in 2023, and the proportion of Florida abortions provided to out-of-state patients increased from 5 percent in 2020 to 11 percent in 2023, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization focused on advancing reproductive rights.

Florida was “the beacon of access for all of the Southeast,” said Daniela Martins, who leads case management for the Women’s Emergency Network, a Florida-based abortion fund, and who called me in between working with two pregnant patients. In recent weeks, Florida providers have been working weekends and late nights to perform as many abortions for as many patients as possible before tonight’s midnight cutoff. “We’ve seen people elsewhere going without essential health care, bleeding in ERs, and we are fully aware that’s going to be Florida soon,” Martins said.

Until now, Martins’s job has involved helping women obtain abortions in Florida; for a typical patient, her organization will cover the cost of an abortion procedure (typically $600–700), as well as an Uber ride to the provider’s office. Now Florida patients seeking abortions will need to travel as far as Virginia; Maryland; Washington, D.C.; or New York for an abortion. North Carolina, although geographically closer to Florida, Martins said, requires a three-day waiting period in between appointments, and she doesn’t recommend that patients go there. On top of paying for an abortion procedure, Florida patients will now have to come up with money for airfare or gas, as well as a hotel; they’ll need to take time off work; and they might have to find someone to watch their kids for a few days. (Although, realistically, many women who might otherwise have obtained an abortion will not be financially or physically able to travel to have the procedure—which is, of course, the purpose of bans like these.) “It’s now going to cost three times more,” Martins said. “For every three people we could help before, now we can only help one.”

The Florida ban won’t just affect Floridians. Pregnant women who are seeking abortions all over the South no longer have Florida as an access point, which means that providers in abortion-friendly states, including Virginia, Illinois, and New York, will face a crush of new patients. Since the fall of Roe, many of these clinics have tried to anticipate this moment by moving to bigger clinics, hiring more staff, and expanding hours.

“We are expecting a huge influx of patients,” Karolina Ogorek, the administrative director of the Bristol Women’s Health clinic in southern Virginia on the border with North Carolina and Tennessee, told me. She’s hired a new nurse practitioner and set up contracts with two more physicians, expanded the clinic’s schedule to include Saturday and sometimes Sunday hours, and created a new landing page on their website to help out-of-state patients find financial support. She’s not anxious about the coming wave of patients because her clinic has faced a similar situation before, when South Carolina passed its own six-week abortion ban last year. “We are outraged,” Ogorek said. “But there is also a sense of calm. We say, ‘Okay, let’s do this again.’”

Florida’s abortion-rights advocates still have hope: A November ballot measure could, if it passes, protect abortion access in the state. And some Democrats, including the president, now view this fairly red state as a potentially winnable one for the first time in years; they’re hopeful that the issue will bring voters to the ballot box. “We’ve got staff on the ground; you’ve seen our investments begin to pop up in the state of Florida,” Joe Biden’s campaign communications director, Michael Tyler, told reporters last week. “It is one of many pathways that we have to 270 electoral votes, and we’re going to take it very, very seriously.”

But my Atlantic colleague Ron Brownstein doesn’t think a Biden victory in Florida seems especially likely, ballot measure or no. “The more likely scenario is that [Democrats] have to worry about Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin,” he told me, and “that they don’t have money—or, more importantly, time—to really give much attention to Florida.”

Related:

A plan to outlaw abortion everywhere The abortion underground is preparing for the end of Roe v. Wade (From 2022)

Today’s News

The judge in Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal trial held the former president in contempt and fined him $9,000 for repeatedly violating a gag order. The judge also warned Trump that he could face jail time if he continues making attacks on jurors and witnesses. The DEA is planning to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug, according to the Associated Press. The proposal would not legalize marijuana on the federal level for recreational use. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to carry on with the planned offensive in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza, “with or without” a hostage deal with Hamas.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me 30 Years Ago

By Jim VandeHei

In 1990, I was among the most unremarkable, underachieving, unimpressive 19-year-olds you could have stumbled across. Stoned more often than studying, I drank copious amounts of beer, smoked Camels, delivered pizza. My workouts consisted of dragging my ass out of bed and sprinting to class—usually late and unprepared …

Then I stumbled into a pair of passions: journalism and politics. Suddenly I had an intense interest in two new-to-me things that, for reasons I cannot fully explain, came naturally …

Thirty years later, I am running Axios, and fanatical about health and self-discipline. My marriage is strong. My kids and family seem to like me. I still enjoy beer, and tequila, and gin, and bourbon. But I feel that I have my act together more often than not—at least enough to write what I wish someone had written for me 30 years ago, a straightforward guide to tackling the challenges of life.

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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