An archive created by independent researcher and artist Maria Robles brings together more than 3,000 clippings from almost 700 newspapers, offering a record of American coverage of Palestine from 1724 to 2023. The project, Covering Palestine, allows readers to examine changes in terminology, editorial framing and the visibility of Palestinian experiences across generations.
Robles spent three years gathering material from digital archives and physical records. She told Middle East Eye that frustration with coverage presenting the conflict as beginning with the Hamas-led attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 prompted the research. Having previously used public archives for a campaign about slavery in New York, she wanted to make historical reporting accessible to a wider audience.
Users can search the collection by year, newspaper and subject. Robles supplies transcribed headlines, citations and links to additional context alongside scanned clippings. She hopes the material will help readers understand Palestinian history before 2023 and give researchers and organisations a basis for questioning how newspapers communicated events.
One theme is the changing vocabulary surrounding colonisation. Newspaper headlines from the early twentieth century openly described plans to colonise Palestine and establish Jewish colonies. According to the project, a shift towards the word settlement began in the 1920s, with colonisation largely disappearing from coverage by 1948. Robles argues that these changes reveal how the language of reporting evolved even as bias persisted.
The archive also examines coverage of Kafr Qasim, where Israeli border police killed 48 unarmed Palestinian civilians, including 23 children, on 29 October 1956. They were returning from their fields and had not been informed of a curfew imposed earlier that day. Israeli military censorship suppressed the story for 44 days. The archive contains no report until 12 December, when Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion disclosed the killings to the Knesset.
None of the archived newspapers reporting that disclosure used massacre in a headline. The word first appeared in an archived headline about the event on 13 October 1958, after eight border police had been convicted by a military court. Robles highlights early headlines that omitted the perpetrators or portrayed the killings as accidental, arguing that such wording shaped readers' understanding of responsibility.
Other clippings document censorship, including a 1980 New York Times dispatch that explicitly acknowledged undergoing Israeli censorship. Reporting from 1982 described Israeli authorities intercepting trucks and confiscating Arab newspapers destined for distribution in the West Bank. Robles connects those restrictions with the obstacles Palestinian journalists face in reporting their own experiences.
The project also seeks to preserve accounts of Palestinian life beyond violence. Robles found that, among 11 headlines about the 1972 killing of novelist Ghassan Kanafani, only one identified him as an artist. Through such examples, alongside older descriptions of Palestinian communities, she hopes to challenge dehumanising portrayals and make a longer history available to the public.
