“Facts Not Feelings.” “History Is Not a Storybook.” “Teach the Past, Don’t Change the Past.” These were some of the signs that pro-Israel protesters brought to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg on the opening night of Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present, the first exhibition in a national museum dedicated to the 1948 dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians.
The founding act of the State of Israel, the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”), unfolded during the 1947-49 war surrounding Israel’s creation and saw Zionist militias destroy 530 Palestinian villages and cities, displacing some 750,000 Palestinians and killing around 15,000, many in brutal massacres. The war diaries of Israel’s founder, David Ben-Gurion, contain a call to “wipe out” Palestinian communities. The creation of Israel was also the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the rejection of Palestinian personhood, nationhood, and culture. This is a reality that Israel and its supporters, including Western governments, still refuse to acknowledge.
The modest Nakba exhibition in Winnipeg was created following decades of lobbying by Palestinian Canadians and advocates for Palestinian rights—not to mention years of opposition from supporters of Israel, including an attempted court injunction to halt the exhibition’s opening and baseless accusations of “foreign interference” following a meeting between museum officials and Mona Abuamara, the Palestinian ambassador to Canada.
The exhibition begins with excerpts from the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and artworks by Malak Mattar, a young Palestinian artist from Gaza. In restrained language, the panels touch on the mass displacement of Palestinians during the Nakba and connect this violence to the continued colonial atrocities inflicted by Israeli forces on Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. A display shows objects related to Palestinian history and culture: a piece of women’s clothing decorated with tatreez embroidery, a set of house keys belonging to a family displaced by Zionist militias, and a wrapper for Jaffa oranges. Short videos show Palestinian Canadians reflecting on various themes: forced displacement, living culture, longing for home, resistance, and lasting trauma.
That’s all it took to provoke the ire of politicians and media outlets across the country.
A view from inside the Palestine Uprooted exhibit. (Photo: the Canadian Museum for Human Rights/X)
Outside the museum, a guest at the opening night of Palestine Uprooted asked the protesters why they were upset. They responded that they opposed the Nakba exhibition because “the Jewish community had not been consulted” about its content and therefore feared that it would be “unbalanced.” None of the protesters had actually seen the exhibition.
A common theme of anti-Palestinian attacks on the exhibition is that the Canadian Museum for Human Rights failed in its duty to present both sides of the Nakba. Yet “showing both sides” of atrocities is not a mandate of the museum. One wouldn’t expect the museum to consult Nazis for an exhibition on the Holocaust or give space to South Africa’s National Party to present a “balanced” view of apartheid.
Claims by Israel’s supporters that they support “balanced history” disguise their true intentions. They are simply opposed to recognizing Palestinian history. They want to suppress Palestinian stories just as Zionist militias buried more than 500 Palestinian villages and cities in 1948. In the name of historical balance, they want to erase history.
A city of 800,000, Winnipeg is perhaps an unlikely focus of national discourse. Yet opponents of Palestinian human rights across the country have turned their ire on the Prairie city. Articles in the mainstream press have accused the CMHR of platforming “anti-Jewish” content and “anti-Zionist propaganda,” and of having “failed its mandate” because it acknowledges the realities of Palestinian history. Five days before the exhibition opened, museum trustee Mark Berlin resigned, claiming that the exhibition “will inevitably promote a one-sided, unbalanced interpretation of Israeli history.” Heritage Minister Marc Miller has attempted to interfere with the exhibition’s content, saying that it should condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization. Miller called the lack of such a condemnation “an unfortunate error in curation” that “should be rectified.”
While serving as immigration minister, Miller oversaw the disastrous Gaza visa scheme, which brought fewer than 1,000 survivors of Israel’s genocide to Canada and subjected them to invasive security screenings.
NDP leader Avi Lewis has labelled Miller’s comments “unacceptable political interference” and “a direct attack on the independence of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights—exactly what the Museums Act is meant to prevent.” Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East responded to Miller with a statement reading:
These comments from Minister Miller are giving fuel to extremists who want to exclude Palestinian Canadian stories and protect the reputation of a foreign state that is guilty of genocide.
For its part, the Israeli embassy in Canada has asked Prime Minister Mark Carney to intervene, contrary to Canadian law, to “halt the Nakba exhibition from display.” Those concerned about “foreign interference” by Palestine’s ambassador have been predictably silent regarding this flagrant attempt by the Israeli embassy to intervene in Canadian politics and shape the content of one of our national museums.
A human rights museum acknowledging the ongoing horrors of Palestinian dispossession might seem like the bare minimum. But in a country like Canada, where anti-Palestinian racism is commonplace and Palestine solidarity is often repressed, the existence of Palestine Uprooted is a victory for Palestinian Canadians and their allies. The fact that the exhibition exists at all in such a context is one source of its power.
The CMHR sold 750 tickets for opening night, with hundreds more on a waiting list hoping to attend the historic event. A long line formed outside the exhibition, with many people hoping to view Palestine Uprooted before the formal opening. To keep the multitude of visitors engaged, the third floor offered an interactive demonstration of centuries-old tatreez art accompanied by live music.
Throngs of people embraced one another in joy and anticipation. Some were in tears. Palestinian Canadian families mingled with a diverse group of guests, including people from local Jewish organizations. Most guests were from Winnipeg, but many had travelled from across Canada to attend the event.
Outside, the crowd of Zionist protesters seemed insignificant.
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Tanya Cheal is a peace and social justice activist on Treaty 1 Territory. She works with many grassroots organizations and is an active member of Peace Alliance Winnipeg.