Canada, Deligitimizing Jewish History, Heritage, Culture, Religion and Society

"Publicly funded institutions have a responsibility to approach contested historical issues with fairness, balance and intellectual integrity."

"A national human rights museum cannot become a platform for politicized narratives that risk contributing to division and misunderstanding, including here by erasing Jewish history, delegitimizing Jewish self-determination, or contributing to hostility against the Jewish community."

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, Shurat HaDin (Israel Law Center) President 

 

Palestinians use the word al‐Nakba — Arabic for “the catastrophe” — to describe their forced displacement in 1948.

In 1948, militias, followed by Israeli forces, expelled civilians, destroying or emptying hundreds of villages amid regional war and lasting instability. Around 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced during the creation of the State of Israel.

Five generations later, these people and their descendants still live with insecurity and uncertainty and are unable to return home.

The exhibition Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present explores the human rights violations related to the ongoing forced displacement and dispossession of Palestinians. Featuring personal stories told through objects and video testimonies, the exhibit presents Palestinian Canadians reflecting on their ongoing struggle for justice and human rights. Together with art, photos, and text, these elements reveal enduring patterns of loss and resistance.

For Palestinians, the Nakba is both their history and their present — it is an ongoing process shaping every aspect of life today.

Canadian Museum for Human Rights  --  Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present 

Displaced Palestinians walk along a road in Jabalia, as they leave areas near Gaza City, January 19, 2025. Photo: Omar Al-Qattaa, Getty Images

"[Fully one-fifth of the population in Israel comprising non-Jewish minorities, including Christian and Muslim Arabs, Druze, Circassians and Samaritans]."

"Their presence in Israel demonstrates their continued existence as Palestinian Arabs in Israel, which complicates the totalizing notion of the 'Nakba' as it is most widely understood around the world, mostly by enemies of Israel and the Jewish People."

"This context is crucial to include. However, all this could have been understood, if the organized Jewish community had been consulted meaningfully from the beginning and not excluded from discussions."

Belle Jarniewski, executive director, Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada 

Palestinians portray themselves as 'victims', perpetuating the myth that the presence of Israel, re-established on Judean ancestral land, was responsible for disinheriting Arabs originally from Jordan and Egypt who had moved to the region to take advantage of opportunities not available to them in their original  homelands. The land called Palestine, originally named such as a 'province' during the Roman occupation, was recognized as land where Jews had lived and thrived for millennia. In 1947 when the United Nations offered their Partition Plan to Jews and Arabs, Jews were swift to re-establish their homeland, while Arabs, calling themselves 'Palestinians' rejected that offer.

 

Jerusalem, Western Wall

 

They did so, because they claimed all of the land as theirs and spurned the legitimate presence of a Jewish state. Many of the Palestinians who fled did so voluntarily, they were not forced out; they planned to return once Arab armies marched on Israel to destroy the nascent state. From 1948 to the present time, Palestinians have cherished their victimhood, holding it out to the world as a dreadful wrong forced upon them. The original 750,000 Arab Palestinians who fled with Israel's declaration of statehood, was more than matched by the 850,000 Arabized Jews who were exiled, their properties expropriated from Arab lands where they had lived a thousand years. The United Nations does not recognize the banished Jews as refugees or victims, as it does the Arab Palestinians.

 

The Jewish refugees from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Algeria, Morocco and elsewhere settled in Israel and elsewhere around the world. Those same Arab nations failed to absorb the Palestinian Arabs as citizens, preferring to leave them as eternal refugees whose status could be used to legitimize the Arab League's hostility to, and military plans against the Jewish State, a situation that went on to see one combined Arab war after another march on Israel, yet the tiny fledgling state was able to fend them off time and again.

 

Israel Bonds marked a rare and symbolic milestone in Tel Aviv with the unveiling of a commemorative stamp issued by the Israel Postal Service.

 

Despite the 750,000 Arabs who fled Palestine, 160,000 chose to remain in Israel. Those Arab Palestinians, now several million in number, are Israeli citizens, with equal voting rights, some of whom sit in the Knesset and in the state judiciary. Israel is a majority-Jewish state, but it extends equal rights of citizenship to the Bedouin, Kurds, Druze, Circassians, Christians, Muslims and others who live among them. This is a reality denied by Palestinians who have fanned out in a wide-ranging diaspora in the West, spending an inordinate amount of public relations time defaming and slandering Israel, naming it an 'apartheid', genocidal state.

 

It is in very fact, the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (ancient Jewish Judea and Samaria) who are operating apartheid status, and themselves committed to genocide. No Jews may live among the Palestinians, by official Palestinian decree. As well, the Palestinian leadership, with the agreement of the Palestinian population dedicates itself to endless terrorist operations against Israel and its Jewish citizens, in the never-ending hope that the Jewish state will miraculously dissipate and the Palestinians will then occupy the land 'from the river (Jordan) to the sea (Mediterranean), triumphant.

 

Honouring Palestinian claims of a 'nakba' (disaster) to compete with and counter the jubilation of world Jewry on the recreation of the state of Israel, is a total farce which history and reality does not support. A national museum dedicated to human rights accepting the fallacy of a people suffering mass displacement as a unique event represents an assault on reason, fact and the historical record. Canada in the entireity of its governments, public institutions, academic establishments, organized unions, has distinguished itself of late as a country that has turned on its Jewish-Canadian population, on its relations with democratic Israel, in favour of commiserating with and honouring a colossal falsehood that deligitimizes Jewish history, heritage, culture, religion and society.

 

For shame.  

 

The Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg, Manitoba, is scheduled to open the exhibition Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present on 27 June Photo