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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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Western Countries Crack Down on Hamas Terror Threat in Europe
A flag is flown during a protest in support of Palestinians in Gaza, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, outside the European Parliament, in Strasbourg, France, Nov. 27, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Yves Herman
Western authorities are intensifying efforts to curb Hamas’s terror threat in Europe, arresting suspected operatives in Germany and imposing US sanctions on key Hamas-linked figures and organizations.
On Friday, German authorities arrested a 36-year-old man, identified as Mohammad S., at Berlin Brandenburg Airport, who is suspected of belonging to a terrorist cell that plotted attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets across the country
According to local media, he is the fourth member of a cell – three of whose members were arrested last year – with links to Hamas, and he is accused of supplying the Palestinian terrorist group with weapons.
The German federal prosecutor’s office ordered the arrest of Mohammad S. upon his return from Lebanon, after investigators found that he acquired 300 rounds of ammunition in August 2025 in preparation for potential Hamas attacks on Israeli and Jewish institutions in Germany and across Europe.
Last year, local police arrested Lebanese-born Borhan El-K, a suspected Hamas operative, after he crossed into Germany from the Czech Republic — part of an ongoing probe into the Islamist group’s network and operations across the continent.
German authorities confirmed the suspect had obtained an automatic rifle, eight Glock pistols, and more than 600 rounds of ammunition in the country before handing the weapons to Wael FM, another suspected member of the terrorist group, in Berlin.
Local law enforcement also arrested Lebanese-born Wael FM, along with two other German citizens, Adeb Al G and Ahmad I, who prosecutors say are foreign operatives for Hamas.
As part of an internationally coordinated investigation into a global terrorist network linked to the Islamist group, German authorities uncovered evidence that it had smuggled weapons into the country for potential attacks in Europe.
The United States is also stepping up efforts to counter the threat of Hamas-linked terrorism in Europe, including imposing renewed sanctions on the group and its operatives.
Last week, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated UK-based pro-Palestinian activist Zaher Birawi, an alleged senior Hamas member, as a supporter of a Hamas-linked group, freezing his US assets and barring Americans from doing business with him.
The US government also sanctioned Birawi’s organization, the Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad (PCPA), identifying him as one of its founding members and a senior official.
According to the Treasury Department, the PCPA “does not only work with, and in support of, Hamas — it operates at Hamas’s behest.”
Birawi also runs the Palestinian Forum in Britain (PFB) and holds leadership positions in the Hamas-affiliated European Palestinians Conference (EPC), organizing anti-Israel protests, flotillas, and campaigns.
Birawi drew international attention in 2025 as a key organizer of the Gaza-bound aid flotilla.
Israel, which designated Birawi as a key Hamas operative in Europe in 2013, uncovered documents last year in Gaza revealing the terrorist group’s direct role in organizing and funding the flotilla.
Among those documents was a detailed list of PCPA activists involved in the flotilla, identifying Birawi as the head of the PCPA’s Hamas sector in Britain.
According to a 2024 report on Hamas civilian fronts in the UK and Europe, Birawi was identified as “one of the most prominent Hamas- and Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated operatives in the UK.”
The OFAC also sanctioned six Gaza-based charitable organizations — Waed Society, Al-Nur, Qawafil, Al-Falah, Merciful Hands, and Al-Salameh — for supporting Hamas’s military wing.
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Iran’s Rising Death Toll Ramps Up Pressure on Trump to Respond
Protesters gathered on Jan. 24, 2026, at Joachimsthaler Platz in western Berlin, Germany, to rally in support of anti-regime demonstrations in Iran, calling for US military intervention. Photo: Michael Kuenne/PRESSCOV via ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
More than 30,000 people may have been killed by Iranian security forces during a brutal crackdown on widespread anti-government protests earlier this month, according to new estimates that far exceed earlier death tolls.
The new figures have intensified pressure on the international community to respond to the Iranian regime’s shocking scale of violence, especially amid a US military buildup in the region following President Donald Trump’s repeated warnings to Iran and calls to help the protesters.
Two senior Iranian Ministry of Health officials told TIME that the scale of the killings and executions has overwhelmed the state’s capacity to dispose of the dead, as anti-regime protests erupted across more than 400 cities and towns, with over 4,000 clashes reported nationwide. According to the officials, as many as 30,000 people could have been killed in the streets of Iran on Jan. 8 and 9 alone.
The Iranian regime has reported an official death toll of 3,117. But new evidence suggests the true number is far higher, raising fears among activists and world leaders of crimes against humanity.
The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), which tracks deaths by name and location, has confirmed 5,937 deaths, including 214 security personnel. Nearly 20,000 potential deaths are still under investigation, and tens of thousands of additional Iranians have been arrested amid the crackdown.
According to Dr. Amir Parasta, a German-Iranian physician, the latest figures do not include protest-related deaths recorded at military hospitals or in regions the investigation never reached, suggesting the toll is likely to keep rising.
More than 30,000 fatalities have been registered so far. With the support of my dedicated colleagues in Iran, we have been able to submit verified figures on deaths, injuries, and executions to the United Nations and to governments, and we will continue to update these data.
— Prof. Dr. Amir-Mobarez Parasta (@ProfParasta) January 25, 2026
Aligned with the Ministry of Health’s new figures, Iran International reported that security forces killed over 36,500 Iranians during the Jan. 8–9 nationwide crackdown, marking the deadliest two-day protest massacre in modern history. Thew news outlet cited newly obtained classified documents, field reports, and accounts from medical staff, witnesses, and victims’ families.
Iran International also noted the prevalence of extrajudicial execution of a number of detainees.
“Images released from morgues leave little doubt that some wounded citizens were shot in the head while hospitalized and undergoing medical treatment. It is evident that, had these individuals sustained fatal head wounds on the streets, there would have been no reason to admit them to hospital or begin treatment in the first place,” the outlet reported. “The images also show that in some cases, medical tubes and patient-monitoring equipment remained attached to the bodies. In other cases, cardiac monitoring electrodes are visible on the chest, suggesting these individuals were under medical care before being shot in the head. A number of doctors and nurses have also told Iran International that so-called ‘finishing shots’ were fired at wounded patients.”
Some families of protesters who were killed have reportedly been told they must pay up to $20,000 to bury their loved ones, while others were forced to sign papers falsely claiming their relatives had served in the security forces instead of participating in the protests.
According to Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of Norway-based Iran Human Rights, the Islamist regime is using this technique to conflate the number of security forces killed and downplay the death toll among protesters.
“One reason for this practice is that the regime seeks to avoid international pressure for killing protesters,” Amiry-Moghaddam said. “Another motive is to prepare the ground for future executions of protesters.”
Iranian judicial officials have previously dismissed US President Donald Trump’s claims about halting execution sentences for protesters as “useless and baseless nonsense,” warning that the government’s response to the unrest will be “decisive, deterrent, and swift.”
With Iranian authorities now maintaining an internet blackout for nearly three weeks, the actual number of casualties remains difficult to verify. Activists fear the internet shutdown is being used to conceal the full extent of the crackdown on anti-regime protests.
Iranian officials told The New York Times that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered security forces to suppress protesters “by any means necessary,” with explicit instructions to “shoot to kill and show no mercy.”
The latest figures, double previous estimates, come as the United States and the broader international community face growing pressure to act against the regime’s ongoing violence. For its part, the Iranian government has warned that any attack will be treated “as an all-out war.”
As regional tensions mount over the regime’s brutal crackdown on anti-government protests, Washington has increased its military presence in the region, moving a range of assets into the area — including the USS Abraham Lincoln and its strike group.
On Sunday, the US Air Force said it was set to begin a multi-day readiness exercise across the Middle East “to demonstrate the ability to deploy, disperse, and sustain combat airpower” in the region.
The UK Ministry of Defense announced last week it had also deployed Typhoon fighter jets to Qatar “in a defensive capacity.”
In the last few weeks, Trump has repeatedly warned that he may take “decisive” military action against Iran if the regime continues killing protesters.
“We’re watching Iran,” Trump said on his way back from the World Economic Forum in Davos. “I’d rather not see anything happen but we’re watching them very closely.”
With pressure mounting for Iran at home and abroad, experts say it remains unclear how Tehran will respond — whether by escalating militarily beyond its borders or by offering limited concessions to ease sanctions and mend ties with the West.
The nationwide protests, which began with a shopkeepers’ strike in Tehran on Dec. 28, initially reflected public anger over the soaring cost of living, a deepening economic crisis, and the rial — Iran’s currency — plummeting to record lows amid renewed economic sanctions, with annual inflation near 40 percent.
However, the demonstrations quickly swelled into a broader anti-government movement calling for the fall of Khamenei and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and even a broader collapse of the country’s Islamist, authoritarian system.
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Jewish Cemetery Desecrated in Barcelona, More Than 20 Graves Vandalized
Photo of vandalized tombstones in Barcelona via Federation of Jewish Community of Barcelona (CJB).
Vandals on Sunday targeted the Jewish cemetery in Barcelona, desecrating more than 20 graves and smashing tombstones.
The crime comes amid a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents and anti-Israel sentiment across Spain, whose Jewish community has expressed alarm over the increasingly hostile environment.
“We have seen how, at demonstrations, online and on the street, hate speech against Jews became routine. Then signs appeared across the city. Later, posters were hung on public buildings with slogans,” the Jewish Community of Barcelona said in a statement. “After that, a map was published marking Jewish targets, including a school. And now, the desecration of graves. This is not random. This is an escalation. From slogans to marking. From marking to threats. And from threats to action.”
The statement referred to an online platform mapping Jewish-owned businesses, schools, and Israeli-linked companies in Catalonia, a region in northeastern Spain.
A spokesperson for the Catalan police told Agence France Presse that “we are aware of the [cemetery] incident and have opened an investigation,”
The European Jewish Congress (EJC) condemned the vandalism on X.
“What we are seeing is not isolated. It is part of a wider escalation that begins with words, continues with targeting and intimidation and ends in acts like this,” the EJC said. “When hate is normalized in public discourse, the step to physical action becomes smaller.”
Israel’s Foreign Ministry also released a statement with photos of the crime, saying, “We condemn the vandalism of the Jewish cemetery in Barcelona. This despicable act is a result of the anti-Israel campaign by the Sánchez government. We stand with Spain’s Jewish community. Antisemitism must never be normalized and must be firmly rejected in all societies.”
In September, Lorenzo Rodríguez, mayor of Castrillo Mota de Judíos in northern Spain, warned that Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had fueled antisemitic sentiment.
“The government is fostering antisemitism that will prove deeply damaging for Spain,” Rodríguez said. “Sánchez’s moves are less about serious foreign policy and more about deflecting attention from his trials and failures in governance.”
Rodríguez described his view that Spain “isn’t leading anything — it’s merely whitewashing Hamas and other terrorist groups.”
Sánchez had told members of his Socialist Workers’ Party that month that Israel should not be allowed to participate in international sports and that the Jewish state “cannot continue to use any international platform to whitewash its image.”
Spain’s Culture Minister Ernest Urtasun has expressed similar calls for boycotting Israel, saying, “We have to make sure that Israel does not take part in the next Eurovision,” referring to the international song contest.
Madrid has been one of the West’s fiercest critics of Israel’s defensive military campaign in Gaza following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
“What [Israeli] Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu presented in October 2023 as a military operation in response to the horrific terrorist attacks has ended up becoming a new wave of illegal occupations and an unjustifiable attack against the Palestinian civilian population – an attack that the UN special rapporteur and the majority of experts already describe as a genocide,” Sánchez said in a televised speech last year.
The diplomatic tension between the two nations reached a boiling point in September, when Madrid recalled its ambassador.
The American Jewish Committee (AJC) describes Barcelona as notable for its anti-Israel sentiment, characterizing its position as an “outlier status.”
The AJC wrote in May 2023 that in February of that year, “Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau announced that Spain’s second-largest city would sever ties with its twin city Tel Aviv. The move answered the demands of anti-Israel activists who in January had petitioned the city council to condemn Israel.”
The Anti-Defamation League’s Global 100 report names Spain as one of the most antisemitic countries in Europe (ranked 15 out of 18 in the region), with 26 percent of adults — 10.4 million people — expressing belief in six or more bigoted tropes against Jews.
The Spanish Jewish community recently filed complaints over an online platform that targeted Jewish establishments.
First reported by the local Jewish outlet Enfoque Judío, the interactive map — known as Barcelonaz — was launched by an unidentified group claiming to be “journalists, professors, and students” on the French-hosted mapping platform GoGoCarto.
As a publicly accessible and collaboratively created online platform, the map marked over 150 schools, Jewish-owned businesses — including kosher food shops — and Israeli-linked as well as Spanish and international companies operating in Israel, labeling them as “Zionist.”
Jewish leaders in Spain strongly denounced the BarcelonaZ initiative, warning that it fostered further discrimination and hatred against the community amid an increasingly hostile environment in which Jews and Israelis continue to be targeted.
Amid the backlash, GoGoCarto announced it had removed the BarcelonaZ project from its website after local groups denounced the initiative as blatantly antisemitic and dangerous.