OP-ED: Nurturing the Palestinian propaganda industry
"An increasingly controversial exhibit, Palestine Uprooted: Nakba, Past and Present, is planned to be unveiled at Winnipeg’s Canadian Museum for Human Rights (the Museum) in June 2026."
Author: Hymie Rubenstein
An increasingly controversial exhibit, Palestine Uprooted: Nakba, Past and Present, is planned to be unveiled at Winnipeg’s Canadian Museum for Human Rights (the Museum) in June 2026.
The Museum is launching a new exhibit examining the Nakba, a period beginning in 1948 when hundreds of thousands of Arabs living in what is now Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, were displaced, some voluntarily, others forcibly, in the war over Israel’s creation.
Its chief executive officer, Isha Khan, said a team of researchers, academics, interpretive planners and designers has been working for several years to curate the exhibit, which will combine different media and materials to recount the Nakba through videos, static art, the written word, and interactive presentations.
Some groups and individuals have praised the proposed exhibit. Others have been damning it in petitions and appeals.
The Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada (the Centre) announced it would hold its annual Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony elsewhere, stating it was “tremendously concerned” that the exhibit “will lack balanced scholarly research and will ignore key issues of the historical and current geopolitical reality.”
The Centre also expressed concern the exhibit could overlook non-Jewish minorities who are Israeli citizens, including Muslim and Christian Arabs, Druze, Circassians and Samaritans – people who hold positions in the judiciary, parliament, health care and the military, and that their equal rights under Israeli law complicate common interpretations of the Nakba.
“We are concerned that the museum may present an unbalanced view of history – devoid of scholarly best practices,” the Centre also said in a statement.
Likewise, in a post on X by Gustavo Zentner, Vice President for Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, issued the following statement:
“When the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs learned of the Museum’s intention to profile the experiences of refugees from the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, we immediately engaged with the Museum’s leadership. We offered to convene leading experts to help ensure that any exhibit presents a balanced, fact-based, and comprehensive narrative, one that reflects the experiences of all refugees, including the more than 850,000 Jews forcibly displaced from long-established communities across the Middle East and North Africa. Recent reports regarding [the exhibit] have heightened our concerns, particularly because our community has not been consulted.
This growing backlash is against an exhibit that is still being fine-tuned.
Partly for that reason, the Globe and Mail’s Marsha Lederman, daughter of Jewish Holocaust survivors, claimed the negative outcry was “not only premature, but preposterous.”
“There is every reason for a museum whose mandate is human rights to install an exhibition about the mass displacement of at least 750,000 people in 1948, during what Palestinians call the Nakba – the catastrophe,” she said.
Her main argument is “There is every reason to trust that the team of professionals at a museum of the CMFHR’s calibre – which relies on federal funds and oversight – will not install a shoddy, biased exhibit that will paint Jews as the devil.”
Lederman’s mocking dismissal of the fear that the exhibit “will lack balanced scholarly research and will ignore key issues of the historical and current geopolitical reality,” thereby erasing “Jewish voices” is easy to dismiss because there is no reason to believe that the exhibit will highlight its crucial context, including that the United Nations sanctioned the creation of the State of Israel with a partition plan intended to create two states – one for the Jews and one for the Arabs in the historical land of Israel – a proposal various Arab enemies of Israel still strongly reject.
Were the Museum actually interested in unbiased truth-telling, its first observation about the Nakba would be that it was created by “pro-Palestinian” activists as the prevailing legend around the creation of the State of Israel and the displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 independence war.
The exhibit will, of course, frame this history as an ongoing human-rights injustice. Which it is – but not the way the Museum will display it.
What the Palestinians call a “catastrophe” is just that. But their “Nakba” is one of the Arabs’ own creation and perpetuation, an eight-decade period of Palestinian statelessness created and maintained by Arab and Palestinian leaders.
After the United Nations democratically voted to partition the British Mandate of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state, the Jews began building the infrastructure for an independent state. The Arabs went to war.
That war and its resultant displacement on both sides and statelessness – for the Arabs – resulted from the Arab refusal to live side-by-side with Jews. Given the option of a Palestinian Arab state next to a Jewish one, or neither, the Arabs unanimously opted for the latter.
That is the catastrophe.
But the current statelessness for the Palestinians has not been a Nakba for tyrannical Arab leaders or fanatical terrorist organizations like Hamas and its copycats. For the former, preventing statehood for people who have never had a historical state of their own, helps obscure the leaders’ own corrupt and incompetent mismanagement of their countries by blaming the Jews for sins of their own making. For the latter, it allows terrorist militias and other violent groups to enrich themselves while maintaining firm control over ordinary Palestinians, most of whom have been brainwashed to support their genocidal antisemitic mission.
Instead, the exhibit will strengthen the false foundation of the lucrative and powerful Palestinian Propaganda Industry, the global equivalent of Canada’s Indian Industry, thereby ensuring that blame for the conflict and for Palestinian statelessness is explicitly transferred to the Jews and the Jewish state.
Pat Johnson has rightly claimed, “A museum dedicated to addressing contested histories, even when they are controversial, betrays Palestinians, Jews, truth and their own expressed mandate. That is the real Nakba.”
Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report and REAL Israel & Palestine Report,is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
Jews, Muslims. Israelis, Palestinians. Wait a minute. This isn't Canada, or it isn't supposed to be. This is supposed to be a Christian country. Their issues don't belong here.
Post-WWII displacement was a catastrophe for millions but only the perpetual victims still have their own UN agency and, 77 years later, haven't moved on and improved their lives. Somehow I doubt the story will be fair and balanced; this is still woke Canada after all. And, as an aside, this was the same human rights museum that demanded "papers please" during the Covid years and refused entry to the unvaccinated. Their concept of human rights is suspect, to say the least.