t Palestinian struggle on the ground, turn on the TV,” says Saleh, who hasn’t returned to the West Bank for 20 years.
If the ledger and the ID card were meant to undermine the Zionist narrative as Saleh describes it, then the passport is intended as a challenge to the Arab neighbors. “The passport has 32 pages filled with stamps that attest to my father’s frequent trips to Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria,” he says. “He was raised in Salama [outside Jaffa] and belonged to a paramilitary organization that tried to enlist the aid of the neighboring states in the war against Jewish settlers in the period leading to May 1948. He traveled to request assistance from the Arab leaders who time after time had promised to help and didn’t lift a finger. Instead of supplying arms to the Palestinians, they told them to go back to his village and they’d take care of them, but they were all corrupt and they did nothing,” he adds, clearly frustrated.
The personal pain and sense of insult that Saleh’s voice betrays are surprising. He admits having maintained an emotional and geographical distance from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict his entire life. So decisive was the break that since leaving home in 1974 he has returned only once, for a brief visit in 1999. He came as an ordinary tourist, more or less. He brought his wife and their two children to see a little of Jerusalem, a little of Bethlehem, focusing on the religious sites, before returning to their comfortable life in Connecticut.
Going his own way
Saleh’s parents left Salama during Israel’s War of Independence, eventually settling in the West Bank town of El Bireh, near Ramallah. There, he relates, the family crowded into a single, small room. Saleh, the 11th child in the family, was born three years later, in 1951.
“The big question from my perspective is why the parents of 10 children who are crammed into one room without money for food would bring another child into the world,” Saleh says jokingly.
Over the years the family settled into a more spacious apartment. His father, who had been a successful farmer before the war, found work at the Red Cross and later in the offices of the Jordanian governor. Some of Saleh’s older brothers looked for employment opportunities elsewhere, eventually finding work in Kuwait.
Saleh also searched for a place to go. At the age of 18, two years after the Six-Day War, he moved to the United States, where he was accepted into a program at a private school. From there he moved to a college in Ohio, where he married a local girl, found work and established a thriving business. He blended into the New Haven community, one of the most established and affluent regions on the East Coast if not the United States. He had exchanged Bir Zeit University, close to where he’d grown up, for Yale University, where this interview was conducted. Middle Eastern food had been replaced by soup from the kosher Katz Deli, located a few hundred yards down the street.
“At some point my parents moved to Kuwait, following my brothers, so that there was no reason to visit the area” he says, admitting that until recently he had shown almost no interest in the Palestinian struggle for independence. He worked in insurance and set up a technology company dealing with employee benefits. He sold the company in 2010, continuing to work as a consultant for it. Chance sucked him into a topic that he’d tried to suppress his entire adult life.
“Just over a year ago I was approached by some locals who asked me to help in establishing a Palestinian museum in the U.S.,” he recalls. “The more I got involved in it, the less I liked their approach and conception. I realized they had no chance of making it work. Instead of staying with them I decided to part ways and set one up myself.”
Ten months later the museum was inaugurated in Woodbridge, the first and only museum in North America which is dedicated exclusively to Palestinian art. The short time it took for getting the museum off the ground can be attributed to Saleh’s financial abilities (“I did not solicit donations throughout th