Sara Yasin’s new digital magazine, The Key, will center Palestine.

The Key launched with an essay by the new magazine’s editor in chief Sara Yasin called “It’s Not Complicated.” The essay is part reflection, part media criticism, part thesis statement for the publication, and Yasin’s opening line rolls all of these themes into one, crisp sentence:

“When you are in Palestine, you see things exactly as they are.”

The Key takes this simple observation as both assumption and challenge: Palestine is worth covering unapologetically, according to their mission statement, “as the core issue at the heart of the modern world.”

The magazine debuted with some wonderful writing. In addition to Yasin’s essay, The Key published two poems by poet and journalist Tamara Nassar and a beautiful essay on the contrapuntal and living between two world’s by poet and translator Alaa Alqaisi.

I had a long talk with Yasin to talk about her vision for the magazine, and how it was inspired by her experiences as a journalist and editor at BuzzFeed News and the Los Angeles Times, as a Muslim and Palestinian American in a post-9/11 America, and as a writer with values. (Our longer conversation will be on the next episode of the Lit Hub Podcast)

The Key is publishing in partnership with the Palestine Festival of Literature, a literary organization that Yasin has worked with since 2013, after meeting the novelist and PalFest co-founder Ahdaf Soueif and getting the opportunity to travel and write in Palestine. The Festival also put Yasin in touch with a community of other publications, writers, and editors who have been similarly clear eyed on Palestine.

“I was very shaped by PalFest’s approach,” she said, which aims to offer a fuller picture to readers. “The fact that they didn’t start from, ‘Let’s break all of your myths’ is really immersing the writers in not just understanding what’s happening, but in really connecting with people,” Yasin said.

This community of like-minded folks has been foundational for The Key‘s team, and Yasin was careful to stress that the publication isn’t claiming to be the only voice responding to legacy media’s failures in covering Palestine.

“There were just so many publications and places and people who have had the kind of bravery that teed it up for something like The Key,” Yasin said, “I don’t think anything like The Key would exist without people pushing the door open.”

In organizing events for PalFest after leaving the LA Times, Yasin encountered an audience with a clear desire for “literary focused spaces to explore these ideas.” Plus, she saw more honest and uncompromising work in literary spaces, as opposed to journalists who were in large part still frustratingly calcified. The idea of pushing for change in static news organizations from within seem fruitless. Even starting conversations sometimes felt onerous for Yasin.

“Untangling that did not seem to be an interesting problem to solve,” she said, “You’re sitting there going, ‘Well I’m just negotiating finer points, and actually this thing is much bigger.’”

And despite accusations to the contrary, this wasn’t Yasin trying to be an activist. She simply wanted to do her job correctly, and wanted others to do the same.

“I want to be a journalist because I want to tell the truth, report things as they are, and do things to a high standard,” she said, “And if I’m not able to do that, then I’m complicit in the things that we’re covering incorrectly.”

Ultimately, the work she wanted to do needed to happen “outside of a mainstream newsroom,” she continued. “And so for me, PalFest felt like the right place to do that because it’s anchored in the same values that I share… doing high quality, very accessible work, but that has very clear and uncompromising values.”

But the values can quickly become secondary if there’s nowhere to publish, and Palestine remains a topic met with reluctance and outright hostility from many large news and media outlets. A lot of writers who might otherwise find a home in mainstream publications instead “find themselves blackballed or they want to boycott these places,” Yasin told me.

“On a very practical level,” she said, “we need to have more places for these people to publish their work that actually pays them.”

“I got sick of saying, ‘Why hasn’t anyone published this?’”

Yasin envisions The Key as a vibrant space for those writers doing work that deserves a prominent platform, and though it’s still early days, she has lots of exciting stuff planned. Her team is gathering writing from political prisoners, media criticism from inside mainstream newsrooms, stories of Hollywood censorship, profiles of the former head of Addameer and of a Palestinian rapper, poetry, and lots more. And the site looks great too, thanks to designer David Pearson.

Yasin is hoping to keep subscriptions low—it’s $2 a month right now—which keeps the writing accessible and, as Yasin put it, “creates a little more of a connection.”

The Key will keep a focus on Palestine, which has emerged as a central issue in so many conversations since October 7th and the genocide began. For Yasin and the whole team, this goes beyond a question of journalistic priorities and values—though Palestine is undoubtedly a vital story, as Israel’s brutality is ongoing and the Western world’s inability to stand up to genocide and war has created permission for further escalations. (As of this writing, Israel and the United States are bombing most of the Gulf, settler expansion in the West Bank is escalating, and Israel has forced at least 700,000 people from southern Lebanon at gunpoint, and on, and on.)

Palestine is central, a galvanizing idea that inspires, echos, and reveals. When we look at Palestine, we look at the world.

“What are the things you cover if the baseline is someone thinks that not only is a genocide happening, but that genocide is wrong?” Yasin said, “What does it mean to tell stories if the goal isn’t, ‘You have to humanize Palestinians?’”