 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 Middle Eastern food had been replaced by soup from the kosher Katz Deli, located a few hundred yards down the street.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 the entire process” he emphasizes), to the fact that it’s located in a building that Saleh had already owned and mainly, he stresses, to the nature of the country it was opened in. “There are many democracies around the world, or countries claiming to be democracies, but there is none like the United States” he says. “Democracy is in the purest and truest sense, a country in which someone like me can set up a museum without needing to obtain special permits from anyone.”
All around, in an area spanning almost an entire floor, divided into many sections, 100 historical photos are proudly displayed, alongside paintings by some of the most prominent Palestinian artists. Another large gallery, devoted to drawings made by pupils from Gaza in 2009 after Operation Cast Lead, features the illustration of this bleeding conflict through the eyes of young children. “For a long time there were attempts to show these drawings in many galleries across the United States, but it was always canceled under pressure from Israel’s supporters, who feared [the drawings] showed Israel in a negative light,” he says. “These are children who for three weeks were under siege, subjected to bombardment from sea, air and land, suffering from serious trauma. These drawings were meant to enable them to express the pain they were subjected to, allowing them in this way to be liberated from this trauma.”
Other walls have paintings by Palestinian artists from Ramallah, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and other Arab states. “Every Palestinian carries a passport of another country” says Saleh in reference to the wanderings frequently imposed on his people. He quickly adds that this excludes the residents of Lebanese refugee camps. “Only they are refused,” he says. “Lebanon does not want to give them passports, not wishing to grant them any civic rights.”
There is also a big wall devoted to photographs taken by European tourists in mid-19th century Jerusalem, as well as one devoted to Rachel Corrie, the American activist killed in 2003 by an Israeli bulldozer as