The museum is unusual because it is situated on the west side of Route 1, the road that was built over the no-man's land that politically divided Jewish West Jerusalem from Arab East Jerusalem before the Six-Day War in 1967. It remains a symbolic division, since few Jews ever go east of Route 1 and few Palestinians go west, other than to work.
The museum itself is symbolically important, too. It is located in what had been the home of a member of the Palestinian elite before the formation of the State of Israel in 1948. From 1948 until the 1967 war it was a guard post for the Israeli Defense Force. For most of the period between 1967 and 1999 it had been a museum honoring the Israeli victory that unified the city of Jerusalem and brought Israel the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
In the mid-1990s, the German foundation that had largely funded the museum told its administrators that it was time to change. After a couple years of renovation, it reopened in its new form—to "raise awareness and provoke thought, encouraging dialogue and finding ways of coping with a multi-cultural society." In an hour's guided tour, visitors are shown powerful audio and visual vignettes not just about divided Jerusalem, but Sarajevo, Berlin, and Johannesberg as well.
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