This paper explores one of the most debated topics regarding the arts, the relationship between artistic production and understandings of what constitutes ‘the real.’ The question of what is deemed real has played a constitutive role in perceptions and practices in the ongoing struggle over Palestine, and as scholars have shown, facts do not in themselves serve as proof of reality. As a result, great attention has been given to discursive and imaged constructions of reality in Palestine, as well as to the renderings of a people and their historical genealogy as mere fabrication. While studies on Palestinian cultural production have focused on an art/politics relationship, particularly within the material terms or allegory of a Palestinian nation, the question of the real has not been substantially theorized. This paper focuses on the museum for two significant reasons: 1. The concept of the museum itself blurs the boundaries between art and politics, art object and socio-political reality; and 2. The role of museums in Palestine is historically connected to Palestinians’ desire for aesthetic and political self-representation. In particular, I investigate the Palestinian Museum, which is hoped to be a (if not the) leading cultural institution located in Palestine and which is promoted as the largest museum in the world devoted to Palestinians. Initially named The Palestinian Museum of Memory, it was conceived as a national museum that preserves and authenticates Palestine’s past. Its new configuration as a transnational museum that cultivates multi-vocal narratives of Palestine and the Palestinians constructs an alternative relationship to the real where narrative is privileged over fact and the constructedness of Palestine is assumed in place of an ontological understanding of the nation. The Museum, scheduled to open in 2016, is firmly embedded within a post-Oslo context where the land of Palestine and its people are continuously reconfigured and art and politics are shaped by future imaginaries of Palestinian reality. This research offers a contextualization of museums not as sites of contestation between two peoples/two narratives but rather an assemblage of multiple ideologies and material and structural processes that contribute to understandings of how the real is conceptualized. Based on ethnographic research on the Museum (interviews, site visits, collection of brochures, press releases, newsletters, media reports), I situate my analysis within recent scholarship on museums in the Arab world that address questions of truth and authenticity, representations of reality, and global spectatorship.