The Need to Dig Down Under the CMHR’s Nakba Exhibit
Feb. 17, 2026
I am a professional anthropologist and archaeologist who has conducted research in both Israel and other Near Eastern countries (e.g., Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey) for the last 25 years, and wish to speak out against the planned “Nakba” Exhibit planned by the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, which vilifies Israel. The exhibit will not acknowledge that Jews are the long-standing indigenous people in the land, having been there since antiquity, and who have a right of self determination. There is no mention that the root cause of Palestinian displacement was the Arab rejection of partition of the original two-state solution and the subsequent military invasion of Israel with intent to destroying it.
Some 90% of Jews, including myself, can trace their genetic origins back to the southern Levantine region. My own Paternal paleo-haplogroup suggests that my roots extend to forty thousand years ago in this region. Jews in the Land of Israel predate the later conquering Arab empires by tens of thousands of years. Hebrew cannot be considered a colonial language as it is a Semitic language from the Levant, not an intruding European language.
The earliest historical record of Israelites in the Land of Israel comes from independent sources in Egypt (i.e. The Pharaoh Merneptah writes about smiting “Israel”). Soon after the Egyptian empire in the Levant collapsed,independent Jewish polities emerge across the region. These culminate in the formation of the United Monarchy of Israel under Kings David and Solomon about 1000 BCE.
There are no earlier examples of other peoples as being indigenous in the region that still exist today with the same culture, religion, and speaking the same language. This is why Jews, who have had a continous physical presence in the land for almost 4000 years are the indigenous peoples of the Land of Israel.
In the 12th century BCE, a group of people that we know from Egyptian sources as “Peoples of the Sea” invaded Egypt who came as invaders from the Aegean region as part of a mass migration. After being thrown out of Egypt, they landed on the southern coast of Israel. Egyptian texts recorded them as the “Peleset,” or Philistine, which in Hebrew means invaders. I participated in the excavation of one of the major Philistine cities – ancient Gath of the Philistines and the Hometown of Goliath.
The word Palestinian derives from Philistine, as the southern coastal plain of Israel is known as Philistia. This is where the Philistines of ancient times lived. The Philistines of antiquity were destroyed and dispersed as a people or nation by the invading armies of the Assyrians and Babylonian empires in the 7th and 6th centuries BCE. While modern Palestinians often claim to be descendants of the Philistines, there no historical, cultural, genetic, or archaeological link between the two.
The word “Palestine” first appeared historically in the 5th century BCE. Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian, wrote of a "district of Syria, called Palaistinê" between Phoenicia and Egypt in The Histories. But "Palestine" was never used by early writers as a name of a people nor as a replacement for the ancient state of Israel, Judah, or other Jewish political entity. The name Palestine was given to the southern Levant by the Roman emperor Hadrian after he quelled a Jewish revolt in the area (132-136 CE, Bar Kokhba Revolt) and dispersed much of the population. He renamed the province of Judea and the Land of Israel as the Roman province of Syria-Palaestina to wipe away the Jewish connection to the land.He deported vast numbers of Jews, athough large numbers of Jews continued to reside across the land.
There was always a Jewish presence in the Land of Israel despite the marauding armies of the various conquerors, be they Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, and so on. In contrast, the Arabs arrived in the region more recently with the Muslim conquest under Caliph Umar in 635 CE – less than 1500 years ago. Linguistically, we can see from both recorded history and their family names, the Arabs come from the Arabian Peninsula (Mecca and Medina). They conquered Jewish ancient locations, and renamed them. The ancient Jewish city of "Shechem" was renamed to "Nablus", coming from the Romans Neopolis, new city. The reason that the Arabs use a post-Roman name to refer to this town is because they were not in Israel before the Romans.
There were always Jewish inhabitants in the Galilee, southern coastal plain, and elsewhere in the Land of Israel. Those who have come in the past 150 years are the descendants of the deportees who returned many times over the past 2500 years to reclaim their ancestral land.
The planned Nakba exhibit by the Canadian Human Rights Museum misrepresents the history, archaeology and anthropology of the region. It will paint Jews as colonizers when in in fact the Jewish people are the long-standing indigenous people of the region (i.e., Land of Israel and surroundings) from antiquity.
