President Joe Biden won a decisive Electoral College victory in 2020 by restoring old Democratic advantages in the Rust Belt while establishing new beachheads in the Sun Belt.

But this year, his position in polls has weakened on both fronts. The result is that, even this far from Election Day, signs are developing that Biden could face a last-mile problem in the Electoral College.

Even a modest recovery in Biden’s current support could put him in position to win states worth 255 Electoral College votes, strategists in both parties agree. His problem is that every option for capturing the final 15 Electoral College votes he would need to reach a winning majority of 270 looks significantly more difficult.

At this point, former President Donald Trump’s gains have provided him with more plausible alternatives to cross the last mile to 270. Trump’s personal vulnerabilities, Biden’s edge in building a campaign organization, and abortion rights’ prominence in several key swing states could erase that advantage. But for now, Biden looks to have less margin for error than the former president.

[Read: Will Biden have a Gaza problem in November’s poll?]

Biden’s odds may particularly diminish if he cannot hold all three of the former “blue wall” states across the Rust Belt that he recaptured in 2020 after Trump had taken them four years earlier: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Biden is running more competitively in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin than in any other swing states. But in Michigan, Biden has struggled in most polls, whipsawed by defections among multiple groups Democrats rely on, including Arab Americans, auto workers, young people, and Black Americans.

As James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist told me, if Biden can recover to win Michigan along with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, “you are not going to lose.” But, Carville added, if Biden can’t hold all three, “you are going to have to catch an inside straight to win.”

For both campaigns, the math of the next Electoral College map starts with the results from the last campaign. In 2020, Biden won 25 states, the District of Columbia and a congressional district centered on Omaha, in Nebraska—one of the two states that awards some of its Electoral College votes by district. Last time, Trump won 25 states and a rural congressional district in Maine, the other state that awards some of its electors by district.

The places Biden won are worth 303 Electoral College votes in 2024; Trump’s places are worth 235. Biden’s advantage disappears, though, when looking at the states that appear to be securely in each side’s grip.

Of the 25 states Trump won, North Carolina was the only one he carried by less than three percentage points; Florida was the only other state Trump won by less than four points.

It’s not clear that Biden can truly threaten Trump in either state. Biden’s campaign, stressing criticism of Florida’s six-week abortion ban that went into effect today, has signaled some interest in contesting the state. But amid all the signs of Florida’s rightward drift in recent years, few operatives in either party believe the Biden campaign will undertake the enormous investment required to fully compete there.

Biden’s team has committed to a serious push in North Carolina. There, he could be helped by a gubernatorial race that pits Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein against Republican Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, a social conservative who has described LGBTQ people as “filth” and spoken favorably about the era when women could not vote. Democrats also believe that Biden can harvest discontent over the 12-week abortion ban that the GOP-controlled state legislature passed last year

But Democrats have not won a presidential or U.S. Senate race in North Carolina since 2008. Despite Democratic gains in white-collar suburbs around Charlotte and Raleigh, Trump’s campaign believes that a steady flow of conservative-leaning white retirees from elsewhere is tilting the state to the right; polls to this point consistently show Trump leading, often by comfortable margins.

Biden has a much greater area of vulnerable terrain to defend. In 2020, he carried three of his 25 states by less than a single percentage point—Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin—and won Pennsylvania by a little more than one point. He also won Michigan and Nevada by about 2.5 percentage points each; in all, Biden carried six states by less than three points, compared with just one for Trump. Even Minnesota and New Hampshire, both of which Biden won by about seven points, don’t look entirely safe for him in 2024, though he remains favored in each.

Many operatives in both parties separate the six states Biden carried most narrowly into three distinct tiers. Biden has looked best in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Biden’s position has been weakest in Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia. Michigan falls into its own tier in between.

This ranking and Trump’s consistent lead in North Carolina reflect the upside-down racial dynamics of the 2024 race to this point. As Democrats always do, Biden still runs better among voters of color than among white voters. But the trend in support since 2020 has defied the usual pattern. Both state and national polls, as I’ve written, regularly show Biden closely matching the share of the vote he won in 2020 among white voters. But these same polls routinely show Trump significantly improving on his 2020 performance among Black and Latino voters, especially men. Biden is also holding much more of his 2020 support among seniors than he is among young people.

These demographic patterns are shaping the geography of the 2024 race. They explain why Biden has lost more ground since 2020 in the racially diverse and generally younger Sun Belt states than he has in the older and more preponderantly white Rust Belt states. Slipping support among voters of color (primarily Black voters) threatens Biden in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin too, but the danger for him isn’t as great as in the Sun Belt states, where minorities are a much larger share of the total electorate. Biden running better in the swing states that are less, rather than more, diverse “is an irony that we’re not used to,” says Bradley Beychok, a co-founder of the liberal advocacy group American Bridge 21st Century, which is running a massive campaign to reach mostly white swing voters in the Rust Belt battlegrounds.

Given these unexpected patterns, Democratic strategists I’ve spoken with this year almost uniformly agree with Carville that the most promising route for Biden to reach 270 Electoral College votes goes through the traditional industrial battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. “If you look at all the battleground-state polling, and don’t get too fixated on this poll or that, the polling consistently shows you that Biden runs better in the three industrial Midwest states than he does in the four swing Sun Belt states,” Doug Sosnik, who served as the chief White House political strategist for Bill Clinton, told me.

Democratic hopes for a Biden reelection almost all start with him holding Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where polls now generally show a dead heat. If Biden wins both and holds all the states that he won in 2020 by at least three points—as well as Washington, D.C., and the Omaha congressional district—that would bring the president to 255 Electoral College votes. At that point, even if Biden loses all of the Sun Belt battlegrounds, he could reach the 270-vote threshold just by taking Michigan, with its 15 votes, as well.

But Michigan has been a persistent weak spot for Biden. Although a CBS News/YouGov poll released Sunday showed Biden narrowly leading Trump in Michigan, most polls for months have shown the former president, who campaigned there today, reliably ahead. “In all the internal polling I’m seeing and doing in Michigan, I’ve never had Joe Biden leading Donald Trump,” Richard Czuba, an independent Michigan pollster who conducts surveys for business and civic groups, told me.

[Read: How Trump is dividing minority voters]

Czuba doesn’t consider Michigan out of reach for Biden. He believes that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has qualified for the ballot, will ultimately draw more votes from Trump. Democrats have also rebuilt a formidable political organization, he noted, while the state Republican Party is in disarray, which will help Biden in a close race. And defending abortion rights remains a powerful advantage for Democrats, Czuba said, with Governor Gretchen Whitmer an effective and popular messenger for that cause.

But Czuba said Biden is facing obstacles in Michigan that extend beyond his often-discussed problems with Arab American voters over the war in Gaza, discontent on college campuses around the same issue, and Trump’s claim that the transition to electric vehicles will produce a “bloodbath” for the auto industry. Biden is also deeply unpopular among independents in the state, Czuba said concerns about his age are a principal concern. “That’s the overriding issue we’re hearing,” he told me. “I don’t think any of those independents voted for Joe Biden thinking he was going to run for reelection.” On top of all that, Sunday’s CBS News/YouGov poll showed Trump winning about one in six Black voters in Michigan, roughly double his share in 2020.

If Biden can’t win Michigan, his remaining options for reaching 270 Electoral College votes are all difficult at best. Many Democrats believe that if Biden loses Michigan, the most plausible alternative for him is to win both Arizona and Nevada, which have a combined 17 votes. Georgia or North Carolina, each with 16 votes, could also substitute for Michigan, but both now lean solidly toward Trump. After Michigan, or the combination of Arizona and Nevada, “there’s a fault line where the math works but the probabilities are pretty significantly lower,” Sosnik said.

Public polls this spring aren’t much better for Biden in Arizona and Nevada than in Georgia and North Carolina. And just as Biden faces erosion with Black voters in the Southeast, he’s underperforming among Latinos in the Southwest. Yet most Democrats are more optimistic about their chances in the Southwest than the Southeast.

In Nevada, that’s partly because the Democrats’ turnout machinery, which includes the powerful Culinary Union Local 226, has established a formidable record of winning close races. Both states have also been big winners in the private-investment boom flowing from the three big bills Biden passed in his first two years in office: Nevada received $9 billion in clean-energy investments, and Arizona got a whopping $64 billion from semiconductor manufacturers. The sweep of Trump’s plans for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants could undo some of his gains with Latinos.

But mostly, Democratic hopes in both states center on abortion. Ballot initiatives inscribing abortion rights into the state constitution seem on track to qualify for the ballot in both, and polls show most voters in each state believe abortion should remain legal in all or most cases. In Arizona, the issue has been inflamed by the recent decision from the Republican-controlled state supreme court to reinstate a near-total ban on abortion dating back to 1864.

Beychok says a message of defending democracy and personal freedoms, including access to abortion and other reproductive care, remains Biden’s best asset across the Sun Belt and Rust Belt swing states. “Abortion, democracy, and freedom have been greater than whatever Republicans have decided to throw against the wall,” he told me. “They can go and scream about Biden’s age, or ‘the squad,’ or inflation and the cost of things. The problem is they have been singing that song for years and they have continued to lose elections.”

If Biden has a path to a second term, those issues will likely need to clear the way again—in the Rust Belt and Sun Belt alike.

The first time I photographed Gerald Ford, he was a day away from being nominated as vice president, after Spiro Agnew had resigned in disgrace. The portrait I made ran on the cover of Time, a first for both of us. Ford was my assignment, then he became my friend. As president, he appointed me, at age 27, as his chief White House photographer, granting me total access. The more I got to know him, the more I admired his humanity and empathy. I remained close to him and his wife, Betty, until the end of their lives. And I was honored to serve as a trustee on the board of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation for more than 20 years.

On April 9, however, I resigned from that position. It was over a matter that might seem trivial on the surface, but that I believe constituted another step in America’s retreat from democracy—the failure of an institution bearing the name of one of our most honorable presidents to stand in the way of authoritarianism.

Each year, the foundation awards its Gerald R. Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service, recognizing an individual who embodies Ford’s high ideals: integrity, honesty, candor, strength of character, determination in the face of adversity, among other attributes. Past winners have included John Paul Stevens, George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Colin Powell, and Bob and Elizabeth Dole. This year, in my capacity as a trustee, I pushed hard for former Representative Liz Cheney to receive the recognition.

After the January 6 insurrection, Cheney famously helped lead the push to impeach President Donald Trump. “The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” she wrote in a statement a few days after the riot. “There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.” Four months later, she was stripped of her House leadership position by an ungrateful and angry Republican caucus. A month and a half later, she joined the House select committee investigating January 6; she soon was named co-chair. The next year, Trump got his revenge: Cheney was defeated in her Wyoming primary by a rival he had backed.

Despite this—and numerous death threats—Cheney has been unwavering in standing against Trump and the risk his 2024 candidacy represents.

[Mark Leibovich: Liz Cheney, the Republican from the state of reality]

Cheney is a friend of mine; I have known her since she was 8 years old and have photographed and spent time with her and her family for decades. But I wasn’t alone in my thinking: Many of my fellow trustees also believed she clearly deserved the recognition. Ford himself would have been delighted by the selection. He first met Cheney when she was a little girl, and her father, future Vice President Dick Cheney, was Ford’s chief of staff. (Cheney herself is a trustee of the foundation in good standing, but several other trustees have received the award in the past.)

President Gerald Ford and an 8-year-old Liz Cheney in February 1975.
(David Hume Kennerly / Center for Creative Photography / The University of Arizona)

Yet when the foundation’s executive committee received Cheney’s nomination, its members denied her the award. Instead, they offered it first to a former president, who did not accept, and then to another well-known person, who also declined. When the door briefly reopened for more nominations, I made another passionate pitch for Cheney. The committee passed on her again, ultimately deciding to give the award to former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, whose last job as a public servant ended more than a decade ago.

To me, the decision was inexplicable; Cheney obviously had been more deserving. Sensing that the foundation’s executive committee no longer shared my principles, I resigned from the board, as I wrote in a letter to my fellow trustees.

Shortly after that letter was published by Politico, the foundation’s executive director, Gleaves Whitney, issued a public statement explaining the committee’s decision and confirming what I had heard from fellow trustees: “At the time the award was being discussed, it was publicly reported that Liz was under active consideration for a presidential run. Exercising its fiduciary responsibility, the executive committee concluded that giving the Ford medal to Liz in the 2024 election cycle might be construed as a political statement and thus expose the Foundation to the legal risk of losing its nonprofit status with the Internal Revenue Service.”

Giving the award to Cheney, Whitney said, would not be “prudent.” Translation: The foundation was afraid. In another statement, Whitney said that Cheney could be considered for the award in the future. That was not only totally embarrassing, but too late.

I believe the foundation did what it did because of the same pressures hollowing out many Republican institutions and weakening many conservative leaders across America—the fear of retaliation from the forces of Trumpism, forces that deeply loathe Cheney and the values she represents. Fear that president No. 45 might become No. 47. Fear that wealthy donors might be on Trump’s team overtly or covertly and might withhold money from the foundation. Fear of phantom circumstances.

[Read the January/February 2024 issue: If Trump wins]

I see Whitney’s legalistic tap dance as a cop-out. Cheney has not announced that she is running; she hasn’t been a candidate for any elective office since she lost her primary two years ago. What’s more, in 2004, the foundation gave its annual recognition to then–Vice President Cheney while he was an active candidate for a second term. In a recent letter to trustees, Whitney wrote, correctly, “We face a very different political environment today than in 2004.” He added that, in 2006, the IRS had cracked down on nonprofits supporting political candidates. But again, Cheney is not a political candidate. Two years ago, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation wasn’t afraid to pay her tribute with its Profile in Courage Award (granted jointly to her, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and three others).

Mitch Daniels might seem like a safe choice for the recognition, a moderate in the mold of Ford. But he has shown none of the valor that Cheney has in confronting Trump. Despite acknowledging that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Daniels has made only tepid comments about the threat Trump presents to democracy. In 2022, for example, The Bulwark’s Mona Charen asked Daniels about a recent warning from President Biden that American democracy was in danger of being subverted by election-denying “MAGA Republicans.” Daniels said he had spent 10 years “ducking” such questions. He allowed that he would “make no objection” to Biden’s statement, but continued: “I think there are anti-democratic tendencies across our political spectrum, or at least at both ends of it.” This was classic both-sides-ism. To me, Daniels in that moment exemplified the kind of passive Republican who is laying brick on the Trump highway to an autocracy.

My resignation is about more than giving one valiant person an award. America is where it is today because of all the people and organizations that have committed small acts of cowardice like that of the Ford presidential foundation’s executive committee. I wanted to draw attention to those in the political center and on the right who know better, who have real power and influence, who rail against Trump behind closed doors, yet who appear in public with their lips zipped. They might think of themselves as patriots, but in fact they are allowing our country to be driven toward tyranny. Every now and then, you should listen to your heart and not the lawyers.

Ultimately, the foundation has tarnished the image of its namesake. I was in the East Room of the White House 50 years ago on that hot day of August 9, 1974, when President Ford declared, “Our long national nightmare is over.” It was a great moment for America, and a bold statement from the new president, acknowledging that Richard Nixon’s actions had threatened the Constitution. Ford could not have envisioned the threat to democracy that America now faces. But he would have been encouraged by a bright light named Liz Cheney—someone who is fighting hard, sometimes alone, for the Constitution that Ford defended just as courageously.

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.”

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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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