Mohammed is Palestinian. Why does 23andMe think he's Egyptian?

When Mohammed Ahmad took a 23andMe genetic ancestry test in 2019 he wanted to understand what his DNA said about his family history. Ahmad, aged 23, had always been fascinated with the past and particularly the history of the Middle East, where his parents were born. What Ahmad wasn’t looking for, however, was a cultural identity. He already knew who he was and how he’d always identify: Palestinian.

Ahmad was born and raised in the US but knows his family history well. His parents migrated after they met in Asira al-Qibliya; a village of around 2,300 people outside the city of Nablus in the West Bank. This village was home to not only his father, but his grandfather and his grandfather’s father. Because of his family’s deep roots in the West Bank, Ahmad was not surprised when he opened the letter from 23andMe containing his results: 100 per cent North African and Arabian.

But not too long after taking the test, the story of Ahmad’s genetic ancestry started to rewrite itself. Email notifications in October 2019 and June 2021 told Ahmad that updates to 23andMe’s system of genetic categorisation had changed his results. In the most recent update, Ahmad’s DNA is broken down into the following percentages: 49.4 per cent Lebanese, 38.1 per cent Egyptian, 2.7 per cent Peninsular Arabian, 3.7 per cent Iranian, Caucasian and Mesopotamian, plus small percentages from other regions.

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Even if Palestine was a fully recognised state, Esselmann says Palestinians do not form a distinct cluster under the company’s current analysis. “The individuals who said they were from Palestine, in our analysis, were clustering with people who were from Jordan, Lebanon, Syria etc,” Esselmann says, “Even though we had Palestinian samples, there was no distinct cluster that we were able to distinguish with confidence that included only people from Palestine.”

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/23andme-genetics-palestine