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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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The Day I Hid My Star of David Necklace
Anti-Israel protesters gather at Museumplein ahead of a 6 km march through the city as part of a protest demanding a tougher stance from the Dutch government against Israel’s war in Gaza, in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Oct. 5, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Charlotte Van Campenhout
There are moments when a small object can feel unbearably heavy.
For me, it was my Star of David necklace — a delicate piece, inherited through generations, usually worn without a second thought. But recently, for the first time, I left it at home on purpose.
I have spent more than a decade publicly defending Israel in the Netherlands. I am not easily intimidated. I have never believed in lowering my voice to make others comfortable. Yet years of activism have taught me something sobering. Conviction does not shield you from hatred.
In the Dutch debate, hostility toward Israel is often dressed up as principled anti-Zionism. The terminology sounds political, even academic. In practice, it frequently mutates into something far uglier. I have been called a dirty Jew, a child killer, a parasite. I have received death threats online. Eggs were thrown at my home. My car tires were slashed more than once. A dead pigeon was once hung on my door in a plastic bag, a grotesque attempt at intimidation.
The irony is bitter. According to rabbinical standards, I am not considered Jewish enough to qualify for Aliyah under religious law, despite Jewish roots on both sides of my family. Yet to those who despise Israel, I am more than Jewish enough to be targeted.
When I reported the harassment, I was advised to keep a lower profile. Perhaps, I was told, I should refrain from speaking so openly in support of Israel. That conversation taught me a painful lesson. Protection would not necessarily come from institutions. It would have to come from resilience.
Over the years, I have lost professional opportunities and personal relationships. I occupy a strange space. Too Jewish for some. Not Jewish enough for others. Meanwhile, I am accused of being a Mossad agent or a paid operative for advocacy groups such as CIDI. The truth is less glamorous. I am simply a Dutch woman who has studied history and refuses to distort it.
Still, something shifted recently.
I needed to see a cardiologist. A routine appointment, nothing political about it. Out of caution, I searched his public social media profile. He had shared and endorsed extreme anti Israel content, including propaganda portraying Israel as uniquely evil. Suddenly a standard medical visit felt charged.
That morning, I removed my Star of David and placed it on my dresser.
The gesture unsettled me more than I expected. It felt like surrender. The same calculation followed before an appointment with another medical professional, originally from Iran. Check social media. Remove visible symbols. Avoid potential bias. Stay invisible.
I am not proud of that instinct. For years I have urged others to stand tall. Yet when you are alone in a climate of escalating hostility, prudence can override pride. Health is not a battleground on which one wishes to test ideological neutrality.
The broader context explains why this fear is not imaginary. The Netherlands has witnessed a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents. CIDI, the Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, recorded 379 antisemitic incidents in 2023, then 421 in 2024, the highest number since monitoring began. Police figures, using broader criteria, have been even higher. These are not abstract data points. They represent Jewish students harassed in classrooms, mezuzot ripped from doorposts, and families who hesitate before displaying visible signs of identity.
Each year on Holocaust Remembrance Day, including ceremonies marking the liberation of, we solemnly repeat the words “never again.” The phrase echoes with sincerity. But remembrance without vigilance is ritual without substance.
My advocacy for Israel does not stem from blind loyalty. It arises from historical understanding. After two thousand years of exile, persecution, and statelessness, the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty in 1948 was not a colonial experiment but an act of national restoration. Israel, like any democracy, is imperfect. It debates fiercely within itself. It includes Jews from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Ethiopia. I have written extensively about the rescue of Ethiopian Jews who found refuge and citizenship there. That diversity alone undermines the simplistic caricature of Israel as a racist project.
When activists declare that Zionism is racism and deny Israel’s right to exist, they claim to be advancing justice. In reality, they are singling out the world’s only Jewish state for elimination. It is not surprising that such rhetoric often spills over into open antisemitism.
The consequences are felt far beyond Israel’s borders. Across Europe and America, Jewish communities report heightened violence and terrorism. The Netherlands is not immune. And so a necklace becomes a calculation.
Yet while I may occasionally remove a symbol, I will not silence my voice. If anything, the climate reinforces why speaking out matters.
Unity is essential. Jews and non-Jews alike must reject the normalization of antisemitism, whether it appears under the banner of anti-Zionism or any other fashionable label. This is not about suppressing legitimate criticism of Israeli policies. It is about drawing a moral line when criticism becomes demonization and when political disagreement becomes collective vilification.
One day, I hope, wearing a Star of David in Amsterdam will feel entirely unremarkable. An heirloom necklace will simply be jewelry, not a statement of defiance. Until then, even if I sometimes leave it at home, I will continue to speak publicly and unapologetically.
Because never again is not a slogan. It is a responsibility that begins in the present.
Sabine Sterk is the CEO of Time To Stand Up For Israel.
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History and Archaeological Evidence Shows Jews Were Pioneers in Learning and Education
Inside the National Library of Israel. Photo: © Herzog & de Meuron; Mann-Shinar Architects, Executive Architect.
The opening of a new building for the National Library of Israel was one of the events overshadowed by the October 7 attack on Israel.
The library, almost five million square feet of space containing five million books, did open its doors on October, 29, 2023. The impressive new building, with its state-of-the-art automated book retrieval system, is a far cry from the library’s modest beginnings in 1892.
That the library opened five years before the first Zionist Congress, and well before the establishment of the state of Israel, indicates the importance that the Jewish people place on books and literacy — and also the long connection between Jews and Israel.
In Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity (1998), Lee I. Levine makes the point that Jews were unique in the ancient world in reading a holy text at religious services and discussing its meaning on a regular basis. (Ezra the Scribe is credited with initiating the reading of the Torah at religious services, in the fifth century BCE, after the return from exile in Babylonia [Nehemiah 8:1-8].)
That Jews are widely associated with literacy is a widespread belief. In fact, the expression “People of the Book” originated in the Koran, as a description for Jews (and Christians). But how literate were they in Biblical times? Scholars such as Meir Bar Ilan suggest that literacy in ancient Israel was low, less than 3% of the population, even as late as the first centuries CE.
After all, with the exception of priests and scribes, why would it be necessary to read and write in an agricultural society? However, recent archeological evidence signals that Jewish literacy in Biblical times was far more widespread than previously thought.
Archeological teams from Tel Aviv University used computer-based analyses to evaluate letters written by a small contingent of 20 to 30 Judean soldiers located at a military outpost at Arad, near the southern border of Judea. The letters, in Hebrew, were written in ink on ostraca (potsherds used as writing surfaces) shortly before the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 586 BCE.
Computer handwriting analysis used machine learning to digitize, segment, and extract features (for example, separation distances, angles, slopes, curves) from script to identify individuals. A professional handwriting expert also evaluated the writing on the ostraca.
The results, published in academic journals (PNAS, 2016 and Plos One, 2020), show that there were at least 12 different writers. They varied in rank, down to the equivalent of quartermaster (much of the material in the letters dealt with provisions and supplies). Clearly, the society represented by the soldiers at Arad must have included an educational infrastructure capable of ensuring widespread literacy.
In Discovering Second Temple Literature (2018) Malka Z. Simkovich, Crown-Ryan Chair of Jewish Studies at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, provides a comprehensive view of the extensive literary output by Jewish communities during the period of the Second Temple (539 BCE to 70 CE). While she does not refer to literacy per se, the variety of material she describes, and the volume of letters written between Jews in Judea and those in the Diaspora (mainly between Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch), suggests that the ability to read and write was common.
Some of the writings Simkovich refers to were found in the Cairo Geniza, a trove of more than 400,000 manuscripts, and fragments of manuscripts, discovered in the storeroom (the geniza) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat (Old Cairo), Egypt.
Most of this collection was taken to Cambridge University in 1896 and today is being digitized. While much of this material involves the post-Temple period, manuscripts from the earlier, Second Temple period, were also common.
The geniza, a uniquely Jewish concept, is rooted in Jewish law. Any old or damaged liturgical texts or ritual objects that may include G-d’s name must not be casually discarded. The geniza is a temporary repository for such material prior to burial in consecrated ground.
The material in the Cairo Geniza was unusual in that the material stored there accumulated for a long time, between the 8th and 19th centuries. It includes secular material, such as legal contracts, accounting books, and personal letters, along with Biblical texts and rabbinical writings, making it a particularly valuable historical find. But equally important, the existence of the geniza is a reminder of the reverence for the written word that is a part of the Jewish tradition.
Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.
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Tucker Carlson’s Huckabee Interview: Confidence Without Comprehension
Fox personality Tucker Carlson speaks at the 2017 Business Insider Ignition: Future of Media conference in New York, U.S., November 30, 2017. Photo: REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
When Tucker Carlson announced he would be interviewing US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, it was clear this would not be a friendly exchange. Carlson, who some have speculated is funded by Qatar, a state that openly backs Hamas, has positioned himself as one of Israel’s fiercest critics in American media.
What followed was not the exposé Carlson likely imagined. It was a two-hour display of confident ignorance.
Yet much of the media coverage focused on a single distorted headline: Carlson’s suggestion that Biblical scripture implies Israel seeks to “take over the Middle East.”
That became the story.
It was also the least revealing part of the interview.
What went largely unreported was not Huckabee’s answers, but Carlson’s performance: his theological confusion, historical sloppiness, conspiratorial insinuations, and failure to grapple with facts that contradicted his narrative.
A Disaster From Start to Finish
Carlson opened the interview with a monologue that appeared designed to rehabilitate his own credibility.
He repeated claims that he had been “detained” at Ben Gurion Airport when leaving Israel after recording the interview, suggesting it was unsafe for him to travel to Jerusalem. He implied he felt endangered after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu allegedly called him a “Nazi.”
That was among the first of his distortions. There is no verified record of Netanyahu making such a statement.
Footage from the airport shows Carlson in the VIP lounge, posing for photos and interacting amicably with staff.
He claimed he was “detained,” that security “took passports,” and his producer was “hauled into a side room.”
Footage from Ben Gurion’s VIP lounge shows Tucker Carlson hugging staff and posing for photos.
So why did @DailyMail and @nypost amplify his wild claims to begin with? https://t.co/ZL6qd2hvn9 pic.twitter.com/Z8lEfgg5LA
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) February 19, 2026
This pattern — reframing routine events as persecution — serves a rhetorical purpose. It casts Carlson as a dissident truth-teller under siege. It does not withstand scrutiny.
Tucker Carlson says he was detained at Ben Gurion International Airport. The Israel Airports Authority says no detention occurred and released a statement backing routine screening. Footage shows a calm VIP interaction. Two narratives. One record. pic.twitter.com/EEGyybELSF
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) February 21, 2026
Another consequential exchange concerned Anthony Aguilar.
Huckabee directly confronted Carlson over his earlier interview with Aguilar, a former Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid worker who claimed he witnessed Israeli soldiers kill a young boy in Gaza.
As Huckabee pointed out, that account was later proven false when the boy was discovered alive.
Huckabee stated that he personally helped coordinate the child’s evacuation from Gaza, working with four countries to secretly extract the boy and his mother less than a week after the alleged “murder.” The operation had to remain covert, he said, because Hamas would have killed the child to validate Aguilar’s narrative.
And yet Carlson still entertained the claim as plausible, naturally failing to acknowledge his own role in broadcasting this fiction to millions.
For a commentator who brands himself as a skeptic of mainstream media narratives, the absence of self-scrutiny was striking.
Bethlehem and Basic Geography
Carlson cited Bethlehem — the birthplace of Christianity — as evidence that Christians are being driven out of the West Bank by Israel.
Bethlehem has been under Palestinian Authority control since 1995. Israel does not govern it, and there has been no Jewish community there for decades.
If the Christian population has declined, the obvious question is: under whose governance?
Huckabee raised precisely that point.
Carlson did not engage.
1/
The media’s takeaway from Tucker Carlson’s interview with Ambassador @GovMikeHuckabee?A distorted headline about Israel “taking over the Middle East.”
That wasn’t the story…
The story was Tucker Carlson self-immolating for over two hours.
Watch the clip.
Then let’s… pic.twitter.com/e5AvpTMGW6
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) February 21, 2026
Theology as Geopolitical Caricature
Carlson invoked God’s promise to Abraham — “from the river of Egypt (Nile) to the Euphrates” — and suggested that this covenant implies contemporary Israeli expansionism across sovereign Middle Eastern states.
This is a categorical error.
The Abrahamic covenant is a theological concept, not a modern policy platform. No Israeli government has articulated a program to annex the Middle East based on Genesis.
By collapsing ancient scripture into a present-day territorial blueprint, Carlson substituted provocation for analysis.
Huckabee attempted to correct the framing.
Carlson appeared uninterested.
Ancestry as Legitimacy Test
In one of the interview’s most jarring moments, Carlson questioned Netanyahu’s right to live in Israel on the basis of ancestry.
“Netanyahu’s family is from Poland,” Carlson said. “There’s no evidence his ancestors ever lived here. On what basis does he have a right to be here?”
Huckabee responded bluntly: “I’m totally unable to process what you’re saying.”
The exchange spoke for itself.
Framed as a critique of one politician, the logic extended further — implying that Jewish belonging in Israel requires genealogical proof acceptable to Carlson.
It was delivered not tentatively, but with certainty.
And then there was the subject of Qatar.
Carlson appeared surprised when Huckabee noted that Christians in Qatar are overwhelmingly migrant workers confined to a restricted church compound, with no Christian citizens and limited public expression of faith.
By contrast, Israel has approximately 184,000 Christian citizens, hundreds of churches, open Easter processions, and church bells ringing weekly.
Carlson initially leaned on a cursory reading of Wikipedia before conceding he did not know the details.
For someone positioning himself as a defender of Christianity in the Middle East, all while seemingly receiving funding from the Qatari state, the disconnect was difficult to ignore.
Conspiracy, Recycled
Carlson floated additional insinuations and conspiracy, including the absurd claim that the United States went to war in Iraq after September 11 because of Israel.
This trope, that Jewish or Israeli influence dragged America into war, has circulated for decades across ideological extremes.
Reducing complex American strategic decisions, Congressional votes, and post-9/11 security policy to “Israel made us do it” is not serious analysis. Yet here it was, presented as such by a former Fox News host watched by millions.
By the end of nearly three hours, a pattern had emerged.
Carlson repeatedly blurred theology into policy, questioned Jewish historical continuity, recycled war-blame insinuations, dismissed counter-evidence, and spoke authoritatively on subjects he appeared not to have mastered.
And he did so with confidence.
That is what much of the media missed.
The story was not Huckabee’s answer to a distorted Biblical question.
It was watching a prominent commentator unravel under the weight of his own thinly sourced claims.
Criticism of Israeli policy is legitimate. Debate over strategy is healthy.
But when interrogation gives way to insinuation, and skepticism morphs into selective credulity, the result is not fearless journalism.
It is confidence without comprehension.
And it was watched by nearly two million viewers in under 24 hours.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.