US secretary of state says a deal is achievable as he makes another diplomatic push to pause the fighting in Gaza.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro, a staunch critic of Israel's war in Gaza, says the Israeli government is 'genocidal'.

An Israeli group dedicated to blocking Jordanian aid from reaching Gaza recorded itself attacking an aid convoy.

International Criminal Court could end decades of impunity by indicting top Israeli security officials over war in Gaza.

Joe Biden has an Israel problem. According to recent polls, more than half and as much as two-thirds of Americans disapprove of how he’s handled the conflict in Gaza. In a February primary in Michigan, more than 100,000 Democrats voted “uncommitted” after critics urged voters to protest his Israel policies. Democratic donors have warned the president that his support for the Israeli operation could cost him in November’s election.

Will it? Most academics and pollsters tend to be skeptical that foreign policy can swing elections. Americans almost always care more about domestic issues than international ones. Their views on foreign events tend to be weakly held and malleable: Voters will typically align them to match those of their party or favorite candidate. Their opinions may be more solid when American lives are at stake, but that’s not the case in Gaza.

This year, however, may be different. Or maybe Israel is different. Because even the academics and pollsters are saying that the war in Gaza could be electorally significant in 2024, in a way that other international issues—including the conflict in Ukraine—will probably not be.

“I think Gaza could matter for a number of reasons,” Michael Tesler, a political scientist at UC Irvine, told me. The war, he explained, had produced a powerful brew of political forces—all of which bode ill for Democrats.

It is a divisive issue within the party, which is home to both dedicated pro-Palestine constituencies and committed pro-Israel ones. It is prominent enough, across news platforms and social media, that people are thinking about the conflict when they focus on current affairs and politics. For many younger progressives, protesting against Israel has become part of a fight for social justice: To them, the Palestinian cause is tied up with such domestic issues as racial discrimination.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Columbia University’s impossible position]

The war in Gaza has also helped create a perception that Biden is hapless. The conflict is a humanitarian catastrophe that the White House has been unable to stop, leaving millions of American voters frustrated with the president. It compounds perceptions that the United States is losing its international position. A majority of American voters now have a poor estimation of Washington’s global standing under Biden’s leadership.

These electoral hazards are amplified by the fact that the contest is likely to be close. In 2016, Donald Trump’s winning margin was so tight that the combined 77,744 additional voters from Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin who chose him could fit in MetLife Stadium. In 2020, Joe Biden eked out his Electoral College advantage by wins in three swing states that totaled fewer than 45,000 votes. Most national polls now have Biden and Trump effectively tied. In this context, one can easily imagine Gaza moving enough ballots to determine the 2024 election—even if it shifts only a percentage point or two of the vote.

“There’s enough there to cause the White House to be worried,” Andrew Payne, a political scientist at City, University of London, told me.

The conventional wisdom is that voters care more about pocketbook issues at home than about what’s happening overseas, a view largely confirmed by the findings of major pollsters such as Pew and Gallup. According to those who study this field, foreign policy is likely to have even less influence in an era of hyper-partisan polarization because voters tend not to cast ballots for candidates from a different party even if they dislike some of their own candidate’s positions.

“Elections matter much more to foreign policy than foreign policy matters to elections,” Payne said, describing the default.

But the supremacy of domestic issues is not an iron law. A meta-analysis published in the 2006 Annual Review of Political Science concluded that voters held “reasonably sensible and nuanced views” on international topics and that their opinions “help shape their political behaviors.” More recent research supports that conclusion. In 2019, a group of political scientists recruited thousands of Americans and asked them to choose between hypothetical presidential candidates with a mix of international, economic, and religious positions, as well as with different partisan affiliations. The researchers found that participants were just as likely to select the candidate they agreed with most on international policies as they were the candidate they agreed with most on domestic matters. Perhaps more telling, the researchers found as well that “Democrats and Republicans were also willing to cross party lines on the basis of foreign policy.”

[Ronald Brownstein: Gaza is dividing Democrats]

Not all international issues carry equal weight, of course. But when an issue is prominent enough that Americans tune in and have a defined opinion, it can make a difference. The Iran-hostage crisis bedeviled President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 reelection bid, and Ronald Reagan got significant mileage out of casting Carter as soft on communism. Foreign policy can certainly hobble parties if it divides them. In 1968, a split between Democratic progressives and centrists over the Vietnam War harmed their nominee, Herbert Humphrey, in what was a narrowly decided contest for the White House. In 2016, Trump made trade a major campaign issue, driving a wedge between many working-class, anti-free-trade Democrats and the party’s pro-globalization elite.

Candidates can lose despite foreign-policy triumphs. Voters in 1992 did not reward George H. W. Bush with a second term even though he had overseen the resounding defeat of Saddam Hussein by U.S.-led coalition forces in the Gulf War. By the same token, candidates can win despite international blunders. President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a morass by the time of his 2004 reelection bid, and he nonetheless prevailed. But the war still exacted an electoral cost. According to a 2007 study by two professors at UC Berkeley, the losses taken by U.S. forces deprived Bush of roughly 2 percent of the vote. Without that bloodshed, the authors wrote, “Bush would have swept to a decisive victory,” instead of a narrow win.

As the 2008 election loomed, about one in three voters told Gallup that they rated the Iraq War as “extremely important”—and the explicitly anti-war Senator Barack Obama won both his party’s nomination and the presidential election in that cycle. His victory helped show that, although very few people vote on international topics alone, foreign problems can acquire a domestic quasi-significance.

Gaza could be another moment when a foreign conflict has major domestic repercussions. Several academics have told me that, in their view, liberals who disapprove of Biden’s approach to the conflict will still ultimately turn out for him: Americans do not typically vote according to a single issue, and stopping Trump is a powerful motivator for even strong critics of Israel. But plenty of more left-leaning Americans were disenchanted with Biden before the war in Gaza broke out. For these voters, the conflict could be a tipping point. “They might not show [up],” Adam Berinsky, a political scientist at MIT and the author of In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion From World War II to Iraq, told me.

Biden might be able to increase his support among such voters by taking a harder line against Israel. The Democratic Party appears to be growing rapidly more pro-Palestine than pro-Israel. According to a Quinnipiac poll last month, 48 percent of Democrats sympathized more with the Palestinians, while 21 percent sympathized more with the Israelis. This represents an almost perfect reversal from October 17, shortly after the bloody Hamas attack on Israel, when 48 percent sympathized more with Israelis and 22 percent sympathized more with Palestinians.

The trend suggests a logic for Biden to make such a pivot. “Biden will need to cobble together every vote of the last coalition to win,” Dina Smeltz, a senior fellow on public opinion and foreign policy at the Chicago Council, told me.

But the president’s party is still starkly divided over the war in a way that the Republican Party isn’t. The issue may not have reached the level of divisiveness that Vietnam had for the Democratic Party in 1968, but as the momentum of controversial campus protests picks up, the parallel grows stronger. “It’s a great wedge issue for Republicans,” Tesler told me.

[David Frum: The plot to wreck the Democratic convention]

Party divisions are not the only way that Gaza could undermine Biden. According to research by Jeffrey Friedman, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, presidential candidates benefit from looking muscular on international issues. In 1960, the then-candidate John F. Kennedy proposed an enormous military buildup, even though polls showed that just 22 percent of voters thought defense spending was too low. Afterward, he steadily gained ground with voters concerned with issues of war and peace.

Weaker-seeming candidates can try to shift conversations away from international issues, but unfortunately for Biden, the war in Gaza will make that hard. And as unpopular as Biden’s approach is, he appears reluctant to gamble on a major shift and is unlikely to do so. He might benefit politically if the United States was able to press successfully for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, getting the conflict out of public discourse and showing that the U.S. has some leverage and authority. But if U.S. pressure failed, Biden might come off as even more ineffectual.  

Although Trump has some isolationist instincts, he is adept at projecting strength in a way that voters associate with American power. Meanwhile, poll after poll suggests that voters see Biden as weak—his job approval on foreign policy is some 10 points lower than Trump’s during his presidency—and the specter of wider conflict in the Middle East is unlikely to change that.

“It reinforces perceptions that the world is in crisis,” Friedman told me. “And generally speaking, when voters feel that there is a crisis, they are much more inclined to vote for candidates they see as strong.”

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.”

Yesterday afternoon, Columbia University’s campus felt like it would in the hours before a heat wave breaks. Student protesters, nearly all of whom had wrapped their faces in keffiyehs or surgical masks, ran back and forth across the hundred or so yards between their “liberated zone”—an encampment of about 80 tents—and Hamilton Hall, which they now claimed as their “liberated building.” At midnight yesterday morning, protesters had punched out door windows and barricaded themselves inside. As I walked around, four police helicopters and a drone hovered over the campus, the sound of the blades bathing the quad below in oppressive sound.

And rhetoric grew ever angrier. Columbia University, a protester proclaimed during a talk, was “guilty of abetting genocide” and might face its own Nuremberg trials. President Minouche Shafik, another protester claimed, had licked the boots of university benefactors. Leaflets taped to benches stated: Palestine Rises; Columbia falls.

[Will Creeley: Those who preach free speech need to practice it]

As night fell, the thunderclap came in the form of the New York Police Department, which closed off Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue and filled the roads with trucks, vans, and squad cars. Many dozens of officers slipped on riot helmets and adjusted vests. On the campus, as the end loomed, a diminutive female student with a mighty voice stood before the locked university gates and led more than 100 protesters in chants.

“No peace on stolen land,” she intoned. “We want all the land. We want all of it!”

Hearing young people mouthing such merciless rhetoric is unsettling. The protester’s words go far beyond what the Palestinian Authority demands of Israel, which is a recognition that a two-state solution is possible—that two peoples have claims to the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. It was striking to see protesters playfully tossing down ropes from the second floor to haul up baskets filled with pizza boxes and water, even as they faced the imminent risk of expulsion from the university for breaking into Hamilton.

No one won here. Student protesters took pride in their collective revolutionary power, and yet appeared to have few leaders worthy of the term and made maximalist claims and unrealistic demands. Their call for Columbia to divest from Israel would appear to take in not just companies based in that country but any with ties to Israel, including Google and Amazon.

The protesters confronted a university where leaders seemed alternately stern and panicked. Columbia left it to police to break a siege around 9 p.m. in a surge of force, arresting dozens of protesters and crashing their way into Hamilton Hall.

The denouement was a tragedy that came accompanied by moments of low comedy, as when a student protester seemed to suggest yesterday that bloody, genocidal Columbia University must supply the students of the liberated zone and liberated building with food. “We’re saying they’re obligated to provide food for students who pay for a meal plan here,” she explained. But moments of true menace were evident, such as when some protesters decided to break into and occupy Hamilton Hall.

[Michael Powell: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’]

Rory Wilson, a senior majoring in history, had wandered over to the site early yesterday morning when he heard of the break-in. He and two friends were not fans of this protest, he told me, but they also understood the swirl of passions that led so many Arab and Muslim students to recoil at the terrible toll that Israeli bombings have inflicted on Gaza. To watch Hamilton Hall being smashed struck him as nihilistic. He and his friends stood in front of the doors.

Hundreds of protesters, masked, many dressed in black, surged around them. “They’re Zionists,” a protester said. “Run a circle around these three and move them out!.”

Dozens of masked students surrounded them and began to press and push. Were you scared?, I asked Wilson. No, he said. Then he thought about it a little more. “There was a moment when a man in a black mask grabbed my leg and tried to flip me over,” he said. “That scared me”

One more fact was striking: As a mob of hundreds of chanting students smashed windows and built a barricade by tossing dozens of chairs against the doors and reinforcing them with bicycle locks, as fights threatened to break out that could seriously harm students on either side, Wilson couldn’t see any guards or police officers anywhere around him. Two other students told me they had a similar impression. “I don’t get it,” Wilson said. “There were some legitimately bad actors. Where was the security? Where was the university?” (Columbia officials did not respond to my requests for comment.)

Less than 24 hours later university leaders would play their hand by bringing in police officers.

For more than a decade now, we’ve lived amid a highly specific form of activism, one that began with Occupy Wall Street, continued with the protests and riots that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020, and evolved into the “autonomous zones” that protesters subsequently carved out of Seattle and Portland, Oregon. Some of the protests against prejudice and civil-liberties violations have been moving, even inspired. But in this style of activism, the anger often comes with an air of presumption—an implication that one cannot challenge, much less debate, the protesters’ writ.

[Michael Powell: The curious rise of ]settler colonialism and Turtle Island

Yesterday in front of Hamilton Hall—which protesters had renamed Hind’s Hall in honor of a 6-year-old girl who had been killed in Gaza—organizers of the Columbia demonstration called a press conference. But when reporters stepped forward to ask questions, they were met with stony stares and silence. At the liberated tent zone, minders—some of whom were sympathetic faculty members—kept out those seen as insufficiently sympathetic, and outright blocked reporters for Israeli outlets and Fox News.

All along, it has never been clear who speaks for the movement. Protesters claimed that those who took over Hamilton Hall were an “autonomous collective.” This elusiveness can all but neuter negotiations.

By 11 p.m., much of the work was done. The police had cleared Hamilton Hall and carted off protesters for booking. At 113th Street and Broadway, a mass of protesters, whose shouts echoed in the night, and a group of about 30 police officers peered at each other across metal barriers. One female protester harangued the cops—at least half of whom appeared to be Black, Asian-American, or Latino—by likening them to the Ku Klux Klan. Then the chants fired up again. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” There was a pause, as if protesters were searching for something more cutting. “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Zionism has got to go.”

As I left the area, I thought about how Rory Wilson responded earlier when I asked what life on campus has been like lately. The senior, who said he is Jewish on his mother’s side but not observant, had a  take that was not despairing. In polarized times, he told me, having so many Jewish and Israeli students living and attending class on a campus with Arab and Muslim students was a privilege. “Some have lost families and loved ones,” he said. “I understand their anger and suffering.”

After spending two days on the Columbia campuses during the protests, I was struck by how unusual that sentiment had become—how rarely I’d heard anyone talk of making an effort to understand the other. Maximal anger was all that lingered.

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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.

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