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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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Bombing Can Weaken Iranian Regime, but Only Popular Uprising Can Overthrow It, Dissidents Say
Members of the police stand guard on a street, with a large billboard featuring Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the background, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 12, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Alaa Al-Marjani
A senior official from a Paris-based Iranian opposition group said on Thursday that the US-Israeli war on Iran would not topple the clerical leadership, arguing that only a popular uprising backed by internal resistance could do so.
Almost two weeks of bombing have killed around 2,000 people in Iran including supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and damaged much of its military and security apparatus.
Iran has responded in kind, throwing global energy markets and transport into chaos and spreading the conflict across the Middle East, while the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has tightened its grip on power and threatened to crush any unrest.
“The 12-day war in June, and the current war, now in its 12th day, proved that bombings cannot overthrow the regime,” Mohammad Mohaddesin, head of foreign policy at the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), told a news conference.
“Even if you have 50,000 armed soldiers on the ground, you need the support of Iranian people. You need a popular uprising. The combination of this 50,000 or 20,000 or any other number with a popular uprising, then you have this power to overthrow the regime.”
Mohaddesin said he did not consider a deployment of US ground troops realistic.
The NCRI, also known by its Farsi name Mujahideen-e-Khalq, was listed as a terrorist organization by the United States until 2012.
It is banned in Iran, and it is unclear how much support it has there. However, along with its bitter rival, the monarchists backing Reza Pahlavi, exiled son of the toppled shah, it is one of the few opposition groups able to rally supporters.
Mohaddesin acknowledged that his group alone could not bring down the system. But he said mass protests, like those that raged in January until they were bloodily quashed, would resume once bombing stopped, and could eventually shift the balance.
“I cannot say how many months or a year, but … this is the track of overthrowing the regime,” he said.
Israeli officials have said that one of their objectives is to weaken the security apparatus so that Iran‘s people can take control of their own destiny.
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Trump Says It Is Not Appropriate for Iran to Be in Soccer World Cup
Soccer Football – World Cup – Asian Qualifiers – Group A – Iran v North Korea – Azadi Stadium, Tehran, Iran – June 10, 2025, Iran players line up before the match. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
US President Donald Trump said on Thursday the Iranian men’s national soccer team was welcome to participate in the 2026 World Cup but that he believed it was not appropriate that they be there “for their own life and safety.”
“The Iran National Soccer Team is welcome to The World Cup, but I really don’t believe it is appropriate that they be there, for their own life and safety,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.
Iran‘s sports minister said on Wednesday that it was not possible for his nation’s athletes to participate after the US launched airstrikes alongside Israel against Tehran. The attacks triggered a region-wide conflict that has shown no signs of abating.
The 48-team World Cup will be held in the US, Canada, and Mexico from June 11 to July 19, with Iran scheduled for matches in Los Angeles and Seattle.
An official withdrawal by Iran from the showpiece event, which has not yet happened, would be a first in the modern era and would leave soccer‘s global governing body FIFA with the urgent task of finding a replacement team.
Iran was the only nation missing from a FIFA planning summit for World Cup participants held last week in Atlanta.
FIFA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Late last year it awarded Trump — who has campaigned aggressively for the Nobel Peace Prize — its own inaugural peace prize.
Earlier this week, Australia granted humanitarian visas to five Iranian women soccer players after they sought asylum, fearing persecution on their return home for their refusal to sing the national anthem at an Asia Cup match.
Trump had urged Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to grant asylum to members of the Iranian women’s team, saying the US would if Australia did not.
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The New ‘Tokyo Roses’: How Social Media Influencers Amplify Authoritarian Propaganda
People stand near a destroyed vehicle as smoke rises after a reported strike on Shahran fuel tanks, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 8, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
At 04:38 on the morning of March 11, 2026, the alert blasted onto my phone: “Red Alert – Tel Aviv.”
Like millions of Israelis during the current war with Iran, my family and I moved quickly into our mamad — the reinforced safe room built into Israeli homes constructed after 1993 — grateful for the air-defense systems intercepting incoming missiles overhead.
Fifteen minutes later, the sirens stopped. I climbed back into bed.
That has become the rhythm of daily life here. Restaurants reopened. Businesses operate. Children move between Zoom classes and the occasional dash to a shelter when sirens sound.
But if you relied solely on social media — particularly X or TikTok — you might believe Tel Aviv had already been reduced to rubble.
Videos circulate claiming the city is burning and the electric grid destroyed. Posts declare Israel is collapsing under missile fire. Influencers insist the truth is being “censored.”
The problem is that this supposed “evidence” turns out to be fabricated, misrepresented, or recycled footage — often not even from Israel.
In other words: propaganda.
The tactic itself is not new.
During World War II, Allied soldiers in the Pacific heard English-language propaganda broadcasts from personalities collectively known as “Tokyo Rose.” Their purpose was to undermine morale, spread disinformation, and convince American troops their cause was hopeless.
The technology has changed, but the tactic hasn’t.
Today, the propaganda battlefield is on social media, and the new “Tokyo Roses” are often Western influencers with enormous audiences.
Consider the viral claims that Iran’s missile attacks have “devastated” Israel.
Several widely shared posts attempted to support this narrative with dramatic footage supposedly showing Iranian strikes on Israeli cities.
Basic fact-checking revealed something else: AI-generated fabrications or recycled clips from earlier events.
Repackaging old footage to fabricate a new narrative is one of the oldest tricks in propaganda. What has changed is the speed. In the social media age, recycled footage and fabricated videos spread globally in minutes, while corrections rarely travel as far as the original lie.
A similar pattern appeared recently when Putin- and Houthi-supporting influencer Jackson Hinkle circulated a video claiming to show massive crowds in Iran mourning the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei. Fact-checkers later identified the footage as coming from the 2020 funeral of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani. By the time the clarification appeared, the misleading version had already spread widely across social media.
Other influencers have gone further by promoting narratives that closely mirror those pushed by authoritarian regimes.
Social media personality Myron Gaines recently argued that Iran “poses no real threat to the United States” and that the war should end because it is “Israel’s problem, not ours.”
But Iran’s regime has spent decades building precisely the opposite reality. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Tehran has treated the United States as a principal enemy. Iranian leaders regularly chant “Death to America,” and Iran and its proxies have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American service members, including attacks in Beirut, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.
Through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Tehran has built a network of proxy militias across the Middle East — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, Shiite militias in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen.
These groups have launched thousands of rockets, drones, and missiles against America and its allies while Iran continues expanding its ballistic-missile arsenal and advancing toward nuclear-weapons capability.
This buildup also fits into the broader ambitions of the China-Russia-Iran axis, which seeks to weaken American global influence.
To describe such a regime as posing “no real threat” requires ignoring one of the most documented security challenges in modern geopolitics.
Unless one believes that the world — and especially the United States — would be freer or safer with China, Russia, and Iran ascendant, the stakes should be obvious.
In other cases, the rhetoric moves from distortion into outright antisemitic conspiracy.
Social media personality Dan Bilzerian has posted messages accusing Western leaders and the Muslim governments cooperating with Israel of “selling out” their people. His posts frequently invoke conspiratorial claims about hidden Jewish forces nefariously controlling Western governments.
These narratives mirror themes long promoted by state-controlled media in Iran and Russia.
Whether intentional or not, the effect is the same: Western audiences are fed narratives that erode trust in democratic institutions while portraying authoritarian regimes as misunderstood and even noble victims.
In some cases, the messaging goes further still.
Recent posts from Candace Owens, widely shared across social media, have encouraged Americans not to serve in the US military and urged those currently serving to quit, while framing the conflict through very dark and conspiratorial accusations about hidden motives to serve supposedly prurient and venal Jewish interests.
Messages designed to discourage military service during wartime have long been tools of psychological warfare. In the 1940s such efforts were broadcast over enemy radio. Today they appear in US based social media feeds.
None of this occurs in a vacuum.
For years the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has treated information warfare as a central element of its strategy. Iranian state media and proxy networks attempt to shape global narratives by portraying the Islamic Republic as a victim while depicting Israel and the United States as degenerate and corrupt aggressors.
These campaigns rely on familiar tactics: recycled footage, conspiracy narratives, and emotionally charged messaging designed to spread rapidly online. What makes the modern environment different is that these narratives no longer need to originate inside Iran to reach Western audiences. Influencers with large followings amplify them instantly.
The propaganda circulating online often revives and relies on something far older than modern geopolitics: classic antisemitic tropes.
Many viral posts go far beyond criticism of US or Israeli policy. They invoke conspiracies about Jewish control of governments, repeat blood-libel accusations, and frame global events as the result of a shrouded Jewish plot.
Versions of these accusations have circulated for centuries. What is striking today is how seamlessly these myths have merged with contemporary geopolitical propaganda.
Authoritarian regimes hostile to Israel have long understood that antisemitic narratives can serve as powerful mobilizing tools. Portraying Israel as the center of a global conspiracy transforms a regional conflict into an ideological crusade.
When influencers with large Western audiences repeat these themes, they normalize ideas that have historically fueled violence against Jews.
The modern “Tokyo Rose” no longer sits behind a microphone in an enemy capital. He or she posts on social media.
The voices spreading propaganda today are influencers with millions of Western followers — many living safely and prosperously inside the democratic societies whose resolve they undermine. Some claim they are offering contrarian commentary. Others are motivated by attention or the financial rewards of viral outrage.
But the effect is the same: narratives promoted by authoritarian regimes are amplified to vast audiences, often stripped of context, facts, or accountability.
Meanwhile here in Tel Aviv, life continues between missile alerts. Millions of Israelis move between normal routines and red-alert interruptions as air defenses intercept incoming missiles. But it bears little resemblance to the apocalyptic fantasies circulating online.
That contrast — between lived reality and digital narrative — reveals something important about modern information warfare.
Propaganda no longer requires governments to broadcast lies. It only requires enough people willing to repeat them — and in the age of social media, there are always volunteers.
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.