The Canadian Museum for Human Rights and the Nakba by David Matas The Canadian Museum for Human Rights planned exhibit "Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present" announced for June 2026 is cause for concern. While what will actually be in the exhibit remains to be seen and is likely not yet finally determined, the very Museum announcement that the exhibit will happen sends out wrong signals. What are the boundaries of Palestine? There are a wide variety of proposals, as well as significant differences in the historical territory once called Palestine.
Whatever those boundaries are, Palestine is land, not people. Contrary to what the title of the exhibit suggests, the land was not uprooted; it is still there. The reference to land instead of people is a commonplace of anti-Zionism. The PLO is called the Palestine Liberation Organization, not the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Pervasive anti-Zionist pamphlets, posters, placards and signs say "Free Palestine", not "Free Palestinians". For anti-Zionists, this reference to land and not people is deliberate. For anti-Zionists the land which is now Israel is or should be Arab, Muslim land. The fact that a Jewish state exists on that land means to them, bizarre as it may seem, that the land itself is not free.
Let's suppose that the Museum was not aware of that connotation and what they really meant to write was "Palestinians uprooted". One question that arises is "Why only Palestinians?" There were more Jewish refugees from Arab countries and Iran created by the refusal of Arab and Muslim states to recognize the existence of Israel and the consequent wars against Israel than Arabs who left Israel during and after the 1948 Arab invasion.
An exhibit which addresses the woes of only one side of an armed conflict is patently unbalanced. Also what was the catastrophe? The text of the announcement of the exhibit states "Palestinians use the word 'Nakba' … to describe their forced displacement in 1948." Some Palestinians indeed use the word in that way. Others use the word to refer to the creation of the State of Israel. For still others, albeit a minority, the catastrophe was the 1948 Arab invasion of Israel and the rejection of the UN peace plan which would have created an Arab state alongside Israel. Some of those who since 1968 have self-identified as Palestinians were forcibly displaced during the 1948 war. Others fled the cross fire, as the text of the Museum announcement of the exhibit acknowledges. Others still left voluntarily, with organized Arab assistance, heeding the calls of Arab leadership to get out of the way of the Arab invasion so that the invaders could target Jews living in Israel without risk of harming Arabs, a reality that the announcement of the exhibit does not mention.
Who are the Palestinians? Does the term include all those present in the territory of former British Mandate Palestine at least two years prior to the time of the 1948 Arab invasion of Israel and who left during that invasion and their descendants, as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency now does? Or is it limited to "those persons who acquired or had the right to acquire Palestinian nationality as of 6 August 1924" and their descendants, the PLO proposal of 2012 for Palestinian citizenship? The text of the Museum announcement states that the exhibit would explore "the human rights violations related to the ongoing forced displacement and dispossession of Palestinians". The immediate violation of those rights after the 1948 Israeli Arab war was the refusal to allow those who left Israel because of the war to be locally integrated in the neighbouring Arab states to which they had gone, an integration for which the United Nations Relief and Works Agency was created to facilitate. The states of arrival have kept those who left in a permanent pseudo refugee status, intended as a permanent indictment of the creation of the State of Israel. Will the Museum exhibit explore that?
Anti-Zionists, not least Hamas, have engineered a wide variety of human rights violations and atrocities against the Arab population of Israel who left Israel and their descendants order to shift blame to Israel for the purpose of discrediting its existence. Is the Museum exhibit going to explore that? The suffering of Palestinians is plain to see. However, unless the Museum treats Jewish suffering equally, of Jews forcibly displaced from Arab countries and Iran, of the Jewish state subject to repeated invasions and incessant terrorist attacks, and of Jews everywhere subject to terror and antisemitism, unless the Museum takes note of the anti-Zionist efforts to engineer and manipulate the victimization of Palestinians in order to discredit the existence of Israel, or, at the very least, avoids joining that manipulation, the Museum will discredit itself.
David Matas is a Winnipeg lawyer and senior honorary counsel to B'nai Brith Canada. He was a member of the original content advisory committee for the Museum.
