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.




“For the fi rst time, 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.”
Ron Kampeas via JTA.org
The Museum of the Palestinian People in downtown Washington, D.C.

a Lebanese-born Palestinian refugee and told of his
family’s fl ight from their ancestral village during Israel’s
War of Independence.

“It opens our mind to hear his perspective, to hear
him say that he’s Palestinian, but he’s never been to
Palestine, he was born in Lebanon, but he identifi es as
a Palestinian,” said Lielle Ziv, who works at Cleveland
Hillel. “He told a story, and not like, right or wrong, it’s
not a black-and-white situation. We can both be right.”
The museum is nestled in a townhouse adjacent
to a pet care outlet, a Middle East bookstore and
a chocolatier. A similar and larger museum in the
Palestinian West Bank city of Birzeit, called the
Palestinian Museum, is in territory that is off -limits
to Israelis.

At the Washington museum, there was a lot of
common ground: A Kurdish Israeli emissary said the
keffi yeh in one exhibit reminded him of pictures of his
male relatives, who wore similar headdresses before
they left Iraq for Israel. El-Khatib was pleased to learn
that the Arabic name for Hebron, Al Khalil, has the
same meaning as the city’s Hebrew name — a “friend
of God.”
One of the Israelis recognized the British Mandate
passport on display, which once belonged to a Palestinian
woman. His grandmother had one that was identical,
he said.

When El-Khatib greeted the group, he said
“Marhaba, Shalom,” respectively the more formal
Arabic and Hebrew terms of welcome, and the group
spontaneously answered with “Ahalan,” a less formal
Arabic greeting that is commonplace among Israelis.

That delighted El-Khatib.

The group was similarly pleased when he showed
J ONATHAN K ESSLER , H EART OF A N ATION
off some Hebrew phrases in a pitch-perfect Israeli
accent, which he said he learned from an Israeli ex.

The group then pushed him to spill more details
about his ex.

“In campus encounters, we’re always kind of on
duty,” said Nati Szczupak, the director of the Campus
Israel Fellows program. “They’re on duty, right? They’re
pro-Palestine. We’re pro-Israel. And it’s very rare that
you can just talk and get to those moments of like, ‘Hey,
I used to wear that hat, too, when I was little.’”
She was referring to an exhibit on diff erent types of
Palestinian headwear that included a fez, or traditional
Moroccan hat, which elicited a squeal of delight from
a Moroccan Jewish emissary who said she had a
photo of herself as a toddler sporting one of her
ancestors’ fezzes.

“It’s not about facts,” Szczupak said. “We know
the facts. What about the narrative? What is your
story? We’re not arguing about the facts, but how we
experienced them.”
The museum’s exhibits include photographs of
Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and in exile, and
are marked by contrasts: images of resistance — of
a small boy throwing stones — and of the mundane
— of young men playing soccer. Arrays of black-and-
white photos from the late 19th and 20th centuries
feature celebrations juxtaposed with resettlement in
refugee camps.

A case includes Palestinian glassware, pottery and
headwear throughout the ages. There was a temporary
exhibit of line drawings by a contemporary Palestinian
artist, and a wall titled “Making their mark” of prominent
Palestinians — including Rashida Tlaib, the Democratic
congresswoman from Michigan; the late Edward
Said, the literary critic and scholar; the sisters Gigi
and Bella Hadid, who are models; and DJ Khaled,
the rapper.

The museum does not hold back from addressing the
Israeli-Palestinian confl ict. The confl ict’s most vexing
issue — each side’s fear that the other side wants
to replace it — was most evident in the museum’s
maps: One depicted the scattering of the Palestinians
throughout the Diaspora, and others showed how
Israel expanded its territory from the land it was given
in the 1947 United Nations partition plan.

Outside the museum, while the Israelis were waiting
for the tour to start, a pair of the Israel fellows examined
a poster for an exhibit, “The Art of Weeping," by a
Palestinian artist, Mary Hazboun. The line drawing of
a Palestinian mother in a traditional dress, carrying her
babies, evoked the map of the entirety of Israel, Gaza
and the West Bank — and then some.

“The proportions are interesting,” one said to the other,
in Hebrew. “It includes not just Israel and the West Bank
and the Gaza Strip, but the Golan Heights and a part
of Jordan.”
Ziv said the tour made her think that she “would
like more connections” with Palestinians — and it was
clear that it was easier to make those connections
in Washington than it would be in Tel Aviv or Jenin.

El-Khatib said he had never met an Israeli before he
moved to the United States.

When Palestinian visitors come to the museum,
he said, they tend to get distracted. “I mean, to
them, it’s more about the achievement of the space,”
El-Khatib said. “But when this group came in, I really felt
that they were very attentive and hanging on to every
word that I said, which was wonderful.” ■
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