Under the current 23andMe algorithm, Palestinians do not exist. Here is my personal experience:

I took a 23andMe ancestry DNA test. As a person of Palestinian descent, when my results finally came out, my excitement had turned to confusion. I was surprised to find that my 'recent ancestry' location did not include any reference to Palestine and in fact under the current algorithm, nobody can obtain a Palestinian 'recent ancestry'. Other areas in the Levant region such as Jordan, Syria and Lebanon do not face this issue.

After contacting 23andMe's customer service team, this was their response:

"Due to the contentious history and very recent migrations in the area, our current classifier and reference population data have trouble consistently detecting recent ancestry from Palestine (the precision and recall do not meet our standards). For that reason, we do not currently report on recent ancestry in Palestine."

Through this exclusion, 23andMe is actively denying the presence and the history of the native Palestinians in modern day Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip and effectively making Palestinians 'genetically stateless' by denying their heritage.

This petition requests for our most basic rights. We request that 23andMe improves their current algorithm to recognise Palestinians as a represented population in their ancestry composition section. 

We are Palestinians. We exist. We are still here and we will never go away or be erased from history.