Statement by the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada
In Response to the planned Nakba Exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights
The Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada has recently learned that the Canadian Museum for Human Rights is planning an exhibit entitled, “Palestine Uprooted: The Nakba Past and Present”. We are tremendously concerned that the planned exhibit will lack balanced scholarly research and will ignore key issues of the historical and current geopolitical reality that is Israel, such as the multi-millennia history of successive colonization and enslavement, beginning in 586 BCE and which continued until 1947, the events such as the Arab Revolts of 1936 to 1939 that led up to the War of Independence, the offer of partition that was accepted by Israel and rejected by the Arabs, the ethnic cleansing and expulsion of more than 850,000 Jews from Arab countries, and the October 7th, 2023 attack by Hamas.
We are also worried that the exhibit may ignore the fact that 20% of the population of Israel are Christian and Muslim Arabs as well as Druze, Circassians, Samaritans, and other non-Jewish minorities. These non-Jews have held and hold positions of tremendous importance, such as on the Supreme Court, as members of parliament (Knesset), doctors, lawyers, in the military and law enforcement, and more and they are entitled and receive everything that Jewish citizens do, such as medical care, education, social assistance and much more. 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. Unfortunately, as no opportunity was afforded to do so, we worry deeply that this understanding of historical perspective may be excluded from the exhibit and related public programs. Whereas there was broad community consultation before the planning of other exhibits, the organized Jewish community has been completely left out of the plans for this exhibit. In fact, we recall that in the years before the museum opened, the Jewish community and scholars from across the country expressed their opposition to the original plan for the Holocaust gallery. At that time, the museum listened and hired new staff, who curated the gallery we see today.
Again, since there has been no consultation with the organized Jewish community, we are concerned that the museum may present an unbalanced view of history – devoid of scholarly best practices. At a time when the Jewish community in Canada and worldwide is experiencing an unprecedented surge in antisemitism, this exhibit will likely exacerbate our situation.
It is therefore, after many years of collaboration on important initiatives with the CMHR, such as the development of the Holocaust gallery exhibit and many partnered programs commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day, that we are withdrawing our collaboration for this year’s January 27th program which we had planned together with the museum. We will instead be hosting a program featuring world-renowned expert, Andre Oboler. Details to follow.
We hope that the CMHR leadership will reevaluate their plans for the exhibit, and we still invite them to meet with us for consultation and dialogue and hope they will do so in good faith. Until that time, and with regret, we will not be planning any partnered programs with the CMHR. We appreciate the work of CMHR colleagues past and present with whom we worked so positively over the years and who had no part in planning this exhibit.
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