feature
A Group
of Israeli
Emissaries Toured a
Palestinian Museum
in DC, and
Came Away With
Questions 18
APRIL 13, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
F or Rotem Yerushalmi, a professional campus
pro-Israel advocate, what stood out during a
recent visit to the Museum of the Palestinian
People was an exhibit showcasing diff erent villages’
ceremonial dress.

She strolled past references to the Nakba, which
means “catastrophe” and denotes the dispersion of
Palestinians during Israel’s War of Independence.

And she gazed upon a photograph of an elderly
man clutching the key to the dwelling his family left
amid that year’s Arab-Israeli war. None of those
surprised her.

“The references to the key, the Nakba, were very
familiar,” Yerushalmi said. “But the garb! I didn’t
know they had diff erent dresses for diff erent areas.”
Yerushalmi was part of a delegation of about
20 Israeli emissaries stationed at U.S. universities
that visited the museum late last month. It was the
fi rst-ever tour the museum had organized for a
group of Israelis.

Like most Jews in Israel, many of them had
relatively few interactions with Arabs inside the
country and learned little about Palestinian culture
and history in school. But here at the Washington
museum, located just a mile from Yerushalmi’s post
at Georgetown University, they got a view into a
society that is both largely off -limits to them and
entwined with their country’s future.

“It’s important because it humanizes each other, I
think, for Israelis to hear the Palestinian perspective,”
said Bshara Nassar, a Palestinian from Bethlehem
who founded the one-room museum in 2019.

“Actually having a wall that separates Palestinians
from Israelis — there is no way, there is no place
to interact.”
The tour was the brainchild of Jonathan Kessler,
the former longtime head of student aff airs at
the American Israel Public Aff airs Committee, the
pro-Israel lobby. He now helms Heart of a Nation,
which organizes people-to-people encounters
between young Israelis, Palestinians and Americans
— and which marks a turn away from the pro-Israel
advocacy he once championed.

“For the fi rst time, maybe in my lifetime, you’ve
got young people from all three societies who
simultaneously recognize that their politics is stuck
and they desperately want to push forward into a
better place,” he said.

He worries that unless they move beyond their
“narrow communal silos,” young Jews in the United
States “will further distance themselves from Israel,
young Israelis will turn their back on the pursuit of
peace with the Palestinians, and young Palestinians
will give up on coexistence with Israel.”
Recommending a tour of the museum, he said,
was a way to make that happen. The Jewish Agency
for Israel’s Campus Israel Fellows, which brought
the emissaries to Washington, D.C., asked him to
recommend museum tours for the group, and he
suggested the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum, the National Museum of African American
History and this tiny, barely known institution.

For at least some of the emissaries, the visit had
Kessler’s intended eff ect. Mohammed El-Khatib,
the group’s docent, described his experience as
Zoonar / Getty Images Plus
Ron Kampeas | JTA.org
ramzihachicho / iStock / Getty Images Plus
Mohammed El-Khatib, a docent at the Museum of the Palestinian People, leads a group
of Jewish Agency emissaries through the museum in Washington, D.C., on March 22.