tuation need only turn on his TV or read the paper.” He explains: “There are many ways of learning about the current suffering of the Palestinians and there are many organizations devoted to this. You don’t have to go to a museum to learn about it firsthand. I’m not a political person and I have no interest in copying what’s done elsewhere.
He says he sees his museum as an attempt “to help the Palestinian cause in the best and most suitable manner for me, through art, a neutral language that everyone can connect with.It is also meant to foster understanding between Jews, Christians and Muslims, not to be a platform for political debates.
“For me, this museum has two main objectives,” he says. “One is to use art to tell the story of the Palestinian people, with their sufferings, ambitions and dreams. To show Americans that Palestinians include artists and poets and photographers, and that they are not just terrorists, as they are portrayed in the media. The second objective is to provide Palestinians with a place that presents their culture, which celebrates their excellence while affording them pride.”
He has mainly good relations with the adjacent Jewish community, he says. “Several media outlets that came to cover the museum’s opening subsequently interviewed the Jewish Federation in New Haven, which had nothing negative to say,” he says with satisfaction. With that, despite the invitation he extended, none of them have yet come for a visit. Both sides realize that such a visit will not take place in the near future.
Palestinians are also not coming in droves, for now. “Some museum visitors came especially from Boston or traveled for several hours from New Jersey and Pennsylvania” he says. But he realizes that as long as the museum remains in an office building in a sleepy town in south Connecticut, far from the lively art and media centers in major cities such as New York or Philadelphia he is fated to remain at the margins of public discourse.
“For me this museum is just a model,” he stresses. “When I established it, I did not accept any donations. I wanted to see how it would turn out, how it would be received. Now my big aim is to get rich donors and to copy this model in other locations, in major cities in which it can benefit from appropriate exposure.”