The Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Winnipeg

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights has unveiled a controversial exhibit on the Nakba, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Still from video, CBC

 

"My dad [Izzie Asper] always said the most important asset you have is  your reputation."

"I think that this exhibit [Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present] is going to have a lot of people lose faith in the museum's trustworthiness for being an honest purveyor of accurate historical and current-day information."

"[The museum piece] deliberately omits key, relevant facts about the conflict [that are crucial to understanding its full context]."

"It's inaccurate, and in my opinion shows bias on the part of the curators of the museum, and is not at the level of scholarship befitting a federal institution." 

Gail Asper founder, Canadian Human Rights Museum in Winnipeg 

Photo: CMHR, Aaron Cohen

 

"The story of the Nakba is a complex one. It's not reduced to a quick little sound bite. There's a lot of nuance with it, there's a lot of history that preceded it and a lot of history that developed over the years of the Nakba."

"Hamas terrorists launched the greatest large-scale massacre against Jewish civilians since World War II, where over 1,150 or so Jewish babies and children and mothers and young people were brutally murdered in the most horrific fashion."

"The failure to describe that horror, and then simply say, Oh, ya, these people were displaced', is an error in judgment."

Mark Berlin, former CMHR board member

 

"The frame, or the scope, of the exhibit is to centre Palestinian experiences of forced displacement. So it's told through their stories, through their lens, and that's an approach the museum takes in a variety of other places."

"Every word in the exhibit is backed up by credible research. We had our research sources academically reviewed internally, and then we took an additional step to have them reviewed externally." 

CMHR chief Executive Isha Khan

A multimedia gallery on the museum's second floor that introduces visitors to a timeline of human rights acknowledges 'hundreds of thousands of people became refugees' in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, including Palestinian Arabs and Jews from surrounding Arab countries. (Tyson Koschik/CBC)

 

The Canadian Human Rights Museum, established in Winnipeg, was the brainchild of Israel (Izzie) Asper, former Canadian media magnate. The initial $24 million required to move the idea of the museum to its actual presence was donated by the Asper Foundation. There was also a public subscription, and later financial support from the federal government. From conception in 2003 to opening in 2014, the museum set out to inform the public of human rights and the world's most egregious assaults against human rights. There were ten permanent exhibits when the museum opened, the Holocaust among them.

 

Most recently the seven-story museum has mounted a Nakba exhibit that includes a collection of photos, video testimonies family heirlooms and artworks to portray the experience of Palestinian Arabs who fled conflict in the area. Keys to Palestinian homes that had been left are among the exhibits. Beginning at the Arab-Israeli war in 1948 when Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Syria attacked the fledgling Jewish state to destroy it in response to the Partition Plan offered by the United Nations empowering Jews to return to their ancestral home, 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled.

 

Most left on the promise by the invading Arab armies that when Israel was destroyed they could return to claim the entire territory; others fled to escape the incipient war situation while others still were forced to leave as enemies of the new state. Over a million Palestinians chose to remain, where there are now 2 million Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel. Concurrently with the re-establishment of the Jewish state, surrounding Arab countries forcefully expelled their Jewish residents who had lived there since antiquity, confiscating their properties. 850,000 Jews found themselves homeless, more than balancing the number of Palestinian Arabs who became refugees through an event they named their Nakba (catastrophe).

 

The exhibit makes no mention of the expulsion of 850,000 Jews from the very Arab countries that went to war on Israel, amidst others. In this mass displacement, the Jews found homes for themselves in Israel or elsewhere in the greater diaspora. The Palestinians who settled in refugee camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon were there ostensibly on a temporary basis; none of the neighbouring Arab/Muslim countries offered them permanent status, much less citizenship.

Palestine Uprooted at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights Photo: Annie Kierans. Courtesy the Canadian Museum for Human Rights

 

And while there is mention of the infamous October 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel led by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, joined by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Fatah alongside the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, along with ordinary Palestinian/Gaza citizens, it fails to identify the victims of that mass atrocity as Jews, only as 'people'. That 'people', the Jews and their country, Israel, responded to that horrific event as any other country would do to protect its own, by invading the area responsible -- Gaza -- in search of the murderous terrorists.

 

That time and place in more recent history was included as illustrative of ongoing Palestinian suffering at the hands of Israel's military 'occupation'. It is disingenuous for the chief executive of the museum to declare that there was academic scholarship involved in the setting up of this one-sided, dreadfully canted exhibition in its obvious obfuscation of cause-and-effect, showcasing Palestinian victimhood by a heartless, 'genocidal' neighbour.   

"I think that the board clearly didn't understand the risks of doing inaccurate exhibits on volatile subjects."

"They didn't understand the impact it could have on their reputation, or they were indifferent, or they were too deferential to management."

Gail Asper 

Protesters gathered outside the Canadian Museum for Human Rights on June 26 to protest the Nakba exhibit. (Rudi Pawlychyn/CBC)