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A group of Israeli emissaries toured a Palestinian museum in DC, and came away with questions
WASHINGTON (JTA) — For 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 different 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 different dresses for different 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 first-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 affairs at the American Israel Public Affairs 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 first 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 told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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 U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the National Museum of African American History and this tiny, barely known institution.
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., March 22, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
For at least some of the emissaries, the visit had Kessler’s intended effect. Mohammed El-Khatib, the group’s docent, described his experience as a Lebanese-born Palestinian refugee, and told of his family’s flight 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 identifies 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 keffiyeh 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 off some Hebrew phrases in a pitch perfect Israeli accent, which he said he learned from an Israeli ex-boyfriend. 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 different 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 conflict. The conflict’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 we have Palestinian visitors coming to the museum, they quickly doze off — 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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In Israel’s missile war, some families run to shelters. Others have nowhere to go.
(JTA) — JERUSALEM — Walking with her children in Pisgat Zeev, a leafy neighborhood in Jerusalem, on Monday afternoon, Rivka recalled the missile that flew nearby the day before.
An impact could be felt as the family hunkered in their private “mamad” or safe room, required in all new homes in the Jewish neighborhood. Those who live in older homes or were far from their residence found their nearest public shelter.
When her children started to cry, Rivka said, she reassured them that the walls of the shelter are strong enough to withstand anything Iran could send toward Israel. “We feel safe in our shelters,” she said.
Just a few miles south, in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, father of three Abed Abu Sharif recalled how he was driving his taxi on Sunday when he heard the unmistakable sound of an air raid alert.
Israeli authorities advise anyone driving when a warning siren sounds to exit their vehicle and look for the nearest public shelter. Abu Sharif knew he would not find one.
“Where am I to go? What am I to do? There is no shelter for me near here,” he said. “I continue driving because I have to provide for my family.”
The disparate experiences point to longstanding gaps in shelter access that are being thrown into stark relief once again by war.
The access gaps exist both geographically — with residents of the country’s dense center more protected — and between Jewish and Arab Israelis.
A Knesset hearing on Monday took aim at the significant number of Israelis who do not have ready access to shelters near their home, with lawmakers expressing frustration over the lack of support for shelter construction despite the constant threat of war since Oct. 7, 2023.
“In my view, this situation is abandonment of human life. Nothing less,” Oded Forer of the Yisrael Beiteinu party said during the hearing. “And it is happening right now, as people try to run to safe rooms, but they don’t have them.”
The hearing only briefly discussed disparities between Jewish and Arab Israeli communities in shelter access, citing statistics from the Israel Defense Forces’ Home Front Command. The statistics — revealed publicly last week — show that only 37 of 11,775 public shelters in Israel, or roughly 0.3%, are located in Arab municipalities, even though Arabs make up about 15% of Israel’s population.
That information dates to January 2025, before last year’s war with Iran. While both the Home Front Command and Israel’s comptroller told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that a newer accounting was not available, Ori Narov, who leads the legal department of the Israel Religious Action Center, said he had received government data showing that roughly a third of the 1,500 shelters installed last year in Israel’s north went to Arab municipalities — a development that he cited as a rare sign of progress in Jewish-Arab equity.
Still, there is only one public bomb shelter in east Jerusalem, according to Bimkom-Planners for Planning Rights, a group advocating for equitable built environments in Israel.
“This is an issue of equity,” said Bimkom’s Dafna Saporta. “We’re talking about the Arab population. They don’t have equality, and they don’t have justice in Israel. The state is taking care of the Jewish population but neglecting the Arabs. It’s not new. It’s a political decision.”
National civil defense standards are set by the Home Front Command, while planning approval rests with local planning authorities, and cities are typically responsible for maintaining public shelters.
“As per the Civil Defense Law, public shelter construction is the responsibility of local authorities, whereas personal protection is an individual responsibility,” Home Front Command said in a statement responding to a request for comment on disparities in shelter access between Arab and Jewish communities in Israel.
It added, “The Home Front Command also takes measures to provide individual protection and to renovate public shelters, based on guidance from the political echelon and government decisions.”
Oct. 7, the subsequent conflict with Hezbollah and last year’s 12-day war with Iran drew stark attention to disparities that had deepened over time. A missile landed in Rahat, an Arab city in the south, killing multiple residents, and another strike in Tamra, in the north, killed several members of the same family.
Some efforts are underway to close the gap. A government initiative called Northern Shield worked to install shelters last year in homes and schools within a buffer zone of the Lebanese border, where rockets from Hezbollah are again flying now.
Nonprofit groups have also stepped into the gap. The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, meanwhile, says it has worked with the government to install 700 shelters since Oct. 7, including several this week and some in a Druze village and in Haifa, a mixed city with large populations of both Jews and Arabs.
And the Israeli organization Standing Together, which advocates coexistence between Arabs and Jewish Israelis, has launched a campaign to crowdfund shelters for vulnerable Arab communities in the Negev.
But advocates say the efforts are far outmatched by the need. “While these initiatives are well-intentioned and deeply appreciated, the scale of the need in the unrecognized villages far exceeds the capacity of civil society,” Huda Abu Obaid, CEO of the Negev Coexistence Forum, said about the crowdfunding campaigns.
The Negev Coexistence Forum joined a lawsuit filed by the Reform movement-affiliated IRAC at the Supreme Court of Israel in 2024, alleging that Israel’s failure to build public shelters in Arab communities was a violation of their civil rights.
The government’s defense rested on high rates of illegal construction in Arab municipalities, which, in their view, absolved them of responsibility to ensure that mamads are installed in new homes. (Retrofitting mamads into older buildings is difficult and costly and not within the budget of any municipality, Arab or Jewish.)
The court sided with the government, ruling that the responsibility for building protective spaces rests with private homeowners and that the state is not obligated to build public shelters.
For Narov, the situation in the Negev is particularly galling because the extant planning process does not account for many Bedouin Arabs living there.
“They are not municipalities recognized by the government, so they can’t even build the shelters if they wanted to,” Narov said. He added, “This is the first responsibility of any state to its citizens: security to keep them safe from attacks, from the inside and definitely from the outside, as we’re experiencing right now.”
“If the law requires a protected room in every new building, but thousands of citizens are prevented from building legally or live in areas excluded from state planning frameworks, then the legal standard itself produces inequality,” Abu Obaid said. “Protection should not depend on municipal status, planning recognition or economic ability. It should be universal.”
The mandate that all new construction include a safe room in each unit or a basement shelter, first enacted in the 1990s, shifted Israel’s safeguards away from public shelters. That includes in east Jerusalem, which is administered by the the city of Jerusalem Municipality and hence the Israeli government, where no additional public shelters have been built in the last decade.
On March 2, an Iranian missile landed at the entrance to Ramat Shlomo, just a few kilometers from the neighborhood, injuring six Israelis.
Fatme, a doctor at a hospital in Jerusalem who was riding bus 218 toward the Qalandia checkpoint at the end of her workday on Monday, passed the crater on her way home. Still, she said, the debate was of little practical significance to her.
“There isn’t a single shelter in my neighborhood,” she said. “So when I hear the bombs, I just go on with my day.”
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Trump says Iran war is ‘very complete, pretty much’ as US and Israel continue to pound Tehran
(JTA) — President Donald Trump gave mixed signals about the status of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran on Monday, telling reporters that the war was “very complete, pretty much” even as he said that he would make a “mutual” decision with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about its end.
At the same time, he threatened Iran in a post on Truth Social, saying, “If Iran does anything that stops the flow of Oil within the Strait of Hormuz, they will be hit by the United States of America TWENTY TIMES HARDER than they have been hit thus far.”
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said Tuesday would be “the most intense day” of strikes yet – while also noting that the pace of Iran’s missiles had slowed.
Three people have died from missile strikes in the last two days in Israel, as well as two Israeli soldiers killed when their tank was attacked while they fought Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon. One of the soldiers killed was from Majdal Shams, a Druze town in Israel’s north where 12 children were killed by a Hezbollah rocket in 2024.
Trump’s comments come as oil prices surge amid disruption in the Middle East that has turned several U.S. allies in the region into Iranian targets. A leading pro-Israel senator has urged Israel to refrain from targeting Iranian oil depots, reflecting anxiety over sharply rising gas prices.
Trump told the Times of Israel that while Netanyahu would have input in the timing to end the war, he would make the final decision. He also declined to entertain the idea of Israel continuing to fight Iran after the United States exits, saying, “I don’t think it’s going to be necessary.”
Iranian officials, meanwhile, have vowed to continue fighting “as long as it takes” and are prepared for a long war.
And Netanyahu said on Tuesday morning that “more is to come” in the war.
The comments come as U.S. and Israeli forces continue to bomb targets in Iran in an attempt to end the country’s military ambitions, destroy its missile arsenal and potentially topple its Islamic Republic regime.
This week, the regime appointed Mojtaba Khamenei, the hard-line son of the assassinated supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as its new supreme leader in a show of defiance. Trump has said he is “not happy” with the choice and would like to see someone else installed.
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When observant Jews gathered to challenge pro-Israel orthodoxy, verbal sparring and walkouts ensued
Hundreds of observant Jews convened at a Manhattan synagogue on Sunday to foster an alternative to the prevailing right-wing discourse about Israeli and American politics in the Orthodox world. But the conference also surfaced uncomfortable arguments within the dissent, with some attendees walking out of one session in protest.
The gathering at B’nai Jeshurun marked the second annual conference for the U.S. chapter of Smol Emuni, which translates as “the faithful left” — a counterpart to a group of the same name working in Israel and the West Bank. A diverse group of speakers that included both Zionists and anti-Zionists grappled with settler violence, humanitarian and spiritual crises sparked by the war in Gaza, and religious rhetoric surrounding the war in Iran.
The big-tent approach gave voice to Americans, Israelis and Palestinians frustrated with Israel’s political direction — and led to some pointed exchanges, including a conference organizer’s public rebuke of the event’s headliner, Rabbi Saul Berman.
Berman, an activist in the American civil rights movement and the former senior rabbi of the Orthodox Lincoln Square Synagogue, went off-topic from his keynote speech to deliver a broad critique of Islam in response to comments about Zionism made by a peace group leader in an earlier session.
For attendees who spoke with the Forward, the conference provided much-needed solidarity in a Jewish milieu that tends to sideline even mild criticism of Israel. It also showed the fledgling movement’s identity being worked out in real time.
“It’s very hard to thread the needle and say, “OK, I am progressive, and I am a Zionist, and I disagree with some things that the Israeli government is doing,” attendee Riva Atlas, a New Yorker who works as a financial researcher, told the Forward.
‘We respectfully disagree’
A morning panel about Gaza brought a few charged moments.
Among the panelists was Gregory Khalil, who co-founded the Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding nonprofit Telos Group and advised the Palestine Liberation Organization on peace negotiations with Israel from 2004 to 2008.
In his remarks, he asked the overwhelmingly Jewish audience to understand the situation of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank from their perspective — and to recognize that hardline Zionism can be an obstacle to reducing conflict.
Khalil said that Palestinians have been treated as an exception when it comes to the principle of universal human rights, and that “resistance” was inevitable as a result.
“The world often operates in two plus two equals four,” Khalil said. “For years, starve them, bomb them, tell them that they’re the criminals. People are going to resist.”
Asked whether he saw the conflict as theological in nature, Khalil said it was a “semantic question,” but that “Zionism very much functions like a religion” because it is often framed as “an article of faith beyond critique.”
Moderator David Myers, a Jewish history professor at UCLA, urged Khalil not to discount that Zionism has theological underpinnings for many Jews — “to think very seriously about considering the theological something other than a sort of new semantics.”
Rabbi Mikhael Manekin, a founder of Israel’s Smol Emuni movement who was joining by Zoom, added that “no matter what word you use to identify yourself — Zionist, non-Zionist, anti-Zionist — at the end of the day, so much of our tradition centers the holiness of the land of Israel. So one still needs to have a conversation about that. A third of our Mishnah is about keeping commandments in Israel.”
Toward the end of the panel, Khalil said he “almost got up and left” because he felt that there was not enough time devoted to talking directly about the devastation in Gaza.
The exchange rankled Berman, who hours later brought them back up in his address to the general session.
The rabbi, who famously led a megillah reading in jail after he was arrested in 1965 marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, expressed disappointment in the morning panelists, diverging from his assigned topic of the struggle over ICE immigration raids in Minneapolis.
“I did not appreciate the assertion that somehow the Jewish passion for Israel need not be heard,” Berman said. “I didn’t appreciate the sense that the theological root of Zionism is the source of horror and enmity and evil.”
Berman added his view that the “theological position within Islam is fundamentally at the root of the incapacity of the Islamic world to recognize the rights of Israel to exist as a Jewish state,” and that idea is “taught actively by imams all over the world, including here in the United States.”
During Berman’s comments, several attendees walked out of the sanctuary. One audience member held up a “BOOO” sign, scrawled on a piece of paper.
One of the conference organizers took to the mic to publicly push back on the esteemed speaker.
“We invited you to speak about immigration and you expressed other views. We appreciate hearing them. As organizers of Smol Emuni, we want to say that we respectfully disagree, but we’re very glad to have you here with us,” Rachel Landsberg, Smol Emuni’s program director, said to applause.
Berman, a graduate of Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, had represented the Orthodox mainstream in a lineup that also featured Conservative rabbis and ex-Hasidic Jews, and had top billing on conference promotional materials.
Yet he had been an imperfect fit from the outset. In an interview after the conference, Smol Emuni executive director Esther Sperber said Berman had expressed prior to accepting an invitation to speak that he disagreed with the organization’s approach to Israel.
Sperber said she was honored that the rabbi — whom she described as “one of the luminaries of the Modern Orthodox world” — attended the whole day. But she took offense at his comments, which she felt painted all of Islam with a broad brush.
“Our intention was for the conference to focus on what we as Orthodox and observant Jews can do better,” Sperber said. “And I think our sense was that Rabbi Berman’s comments were more focused on what Palestinians can do better.”
Sperber added that the Smol Emuni movement is “not looking to include everyone in the Jewish world” but welcomes anyone who identifies with the religious left and supports universal human rights for Palestinians.
‘Whispered invitations’
While the clashes punctuated the gathering, other sessions more quietly worked through challenging topics, including ICE and immigration policy, grounded in the Torah’s call to protect the stranger; a screening of Children No More, a documentary about activists holding silent vigils in Tel Aviv for children killed by the Israeli military in Gaza; a conversation about “Zionism and Nationalism in the Haredi Community”; and a session about creating more nuanced Israel curriculum in Jewish schools.
Several speakers described the difficulty of challenging what can seem like a strong uncritically pro-Israel consensus in religious Zionist communities.
“Close friends in Israel — decent, religious, fair minded and highly educated people — sent me the following reading on Purim. I shudder as I read the words: ‘A bomb has been dropped in Tehran in your honor. Purim Sameach,’” Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller told the crowd. “What an obscene perversion. A sickness has overtaken the religious Zionist community.”
Some spoke despite potential repercussions in their communities, while others remained silent observers. One conference attendee declined to speak with the Forward, citing potential backlash from his Israel-aligned congregation if they learned he had attended.
Gershon Rosenberg, a junior at the modern Orthodox Jewish day school SAR Academy in the Bronx, said during the Israel education panel that he faced intense backlash from his community after writing an op-ed in his school newspaper arguing for a broader understanding of the conflict in Gaza. But he also found peers expressing support.
“A lot of people would reach out to me and say, ‘It was so meaningful for me to see someone else, a young person, show that I’m not alone, that there are a lot of other people out there in the Orthodox community who have these persuasions,’” Rosenberg said.
Rabbi Sharon Brous, who leads the unaffiliated Los Angeles synagogue Ikar, said a local Smol Emuni gathering, organized through “whispered invitations,” had helped attendees realize their views on Israel were more widely held than they had assumed.
Sperber, who grew up in Israel and now lives in New York City, said she felt like she was “living in a different reality” than her family due to their political differences.
Most troubling to her, she said, was leaders citing Jewish tradition to enact vengeance.
“The situation in Israel and the region is dangerous and combustible, but my other very deep, deep concern is not just the danger of war, but its corruption of our faith and our Judaism,” Sperber said. “Our tradition has been hijacked.”
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