"Despite numerous pleas over many, many months by many different people there has been a very careful effort to provide no context for the Palestinian displacement whatsoever."

"From what I’ve seen from the website, it is a very one-sided, biased narrative that is not befitting a national federal museum." 

Gail Asper whose father Israel Asper founded the Museum of Human Rights

 

"It is difficult to understand how telling the story of Palestinian displacement in 1948 while omitting the simultaneous expulsion of 850,000 Jews from the Arab states can be viewed as anything other than politically motivated."

"In response, the museum has only made a vague commitment to exploring that story as part of a broader exhibit on displacement at some time in the unknown future."

"But the stories are not severable — they occurred at the same historical moment."

Letter of Resignation from CMHR Board, Mark Berlin, McGill law professor, human rights lawyer

Protesters rally outside the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, June 26, 2026. (Credit: Izzie Helenchilde)

 

In 1948 when Arab armies joined forces to attack the nascent Jewish state following the UN's 1947 Partition Plan for Palestine declaration, offering an opportunity for both Jews and Arabs to declare their sovereign state intentions, Jews moved directly to form their sovereign nation as a reborn-from-antiquity Israel. Palestinians had chosen to reject the opportunity, in the process refusing Israel's right of existence.

An estimated 750,000 Arab Palestinians fled the fledgling Israel, persuaded by surrounding Arab states to leave, planning to return once the combined Arab militaries had destroyed the Jewish state-that-would-be.

 

When the motley collection of Jewish kibbutz farmers, Holocaust survivors, former refugees and members of the Jewish resistance, hurriedly formed into a new army for a new state somehow, miraculously foiled the Arab League's plan of extinction, leaving the Arab armies to themselves flee, the unexpected debacle was declared by the defeated Arabs to represent a catastrophe, a "Nakba". That word was immediately adopted by the self-exiled Arabs now calling themselves Palestinians to describe the advent of Israel's existence, on Judean ancestral land, that the 'Palestinians' claimed as their very own.

 

While some of the 750,000 Arabs who fled Israel may have been propelled by fear of Jewish threats, most were convinced by Arab leaders they would return triumphant to take possession of the entire geography once Israel was destroyed. At the same time, there were hundreds of thousands of Arabs who made no move to leave, and remained where they were, becoming citizens of Israel, while still calling themselves Palestinians. During that period, Arab countries where Jews had lived throughout the diaspora for millennia were exiled, their properties confiscated, some 850,000 Arabized Jews from Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Libya.

 

While Palestinians, aided and abetted by the United Nations, became permanent 'refugees', demanding a right of return and the dissolution of Israel, their Jewish counterparts from Algeria, Tunisia and elsewhere, found refuge in Israel and other destinations around the world. Their loss has never been internationally acknowledged, while that of the Palestinian Arabs became a legendary injustice to be used as a cudgel against Israel. That Palestinian Arabs today make up over 20% of the Israeli population does not stop the compassionate left from labelling Israel an apartheid state, happy to chorus Palestinian propaganda.

 

And it is Palestinian propaganda and the functioning aggressive ill-will of its slanderous campaign to delegitimize Israel and convince the global community that Israel is committing 'genocide' against the Palestinians when it is the Palestinian leadership that has for 70 years incited their population to 'resist the occupation', an 'occupation' necessitated by the patterning of the leadership toward martyrdom in convincing their youth, both male and female of their duty to kill Jews, to destroy the Jewish state, to reclaim 'Palestine', 'from the river to the sea'.

 

That is the packaged message weaponized in the Nakba exhibition at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights which was originally dedicated to educating the public about the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust. The very genocide that President Mahmoud Abbas mocked and minimized in his doctoral thesis at the Patrice Lamumba University in Russia. The leader of the West Bank whose martyrs' fund pays the families of Palestinian murderers of Jews as rewards, along with those imprisoned in Israeli jails for crimes against Israel in its 'Pay for Slay' program.

 

Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present’ exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, June 26, 2026. (Credit: Izzie Helenchilde).

 

What the public visiting the exhibit, Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present will see is the juxtaposition of the exhibit against that of the original Holocaust memorialization of a historic tragedy of intense proportions that ended in the death of almost half of the world's Jewish population; most of the Jewish-European diaspora. That is the meaning of genocide. The Nakba exhibit pretends to equate Palestinian trials and tribulations caused by their insistence that murdering Jews will restore the land they claim to be theirs, not that of the Jews of Israel, with the immeasurable loss of Jewish lives through the state channels of an ancient hatred. 

 

"Around 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced during the creation of the State of Israel", the displays proclaim in a perspective that suits the purpose of damning Israel for victimizing Arab Palestinians. That historically, the term Palestinian was always interpreted as Jews living in that area of the Middle East, later shared by others who had migrated to the area by Arabs from Egypt, Syria and Lebanon looking for opportunities, and devout Christians wanting to live where their faith resonated, that designation was totally co-opted by Arabs now claiming the title of Palestinians.

 

Jewish prophets, their burial grounds in memoriam, place names, histories, cultural traditions, history, have all in turn been co-opted by Arab Palestinians claiming all to be theirs. The refusal to recognize and acknowledge Israel's right of existence, the never-ending plaints of victimhood, the inversion of truth and reality, somehow seem to resonate with an international community seasoned by latent leftist 'compassion' for a people whose uncompromising fealty to violence as a solution to all their problems never seems to be recognized by 'progressives'.

 

A memory box containing artifacts and recorded personal stories at the ‘Nakba Past and Present’ exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, June 26, 2026. (Credit: Izzie Helenchilde)

 

In Canada, the Liberal-led government that equates 'Islamophobia' with Antisemitism despite that it is largely the former that commits the latter, and enjoys intoning that immigration groups while adding to Canada's vaunted multiculturalism -- certainly not homogeneity -- must leave their heritage animosities behind when they become Canadian, simply chooses to overlook fact, preferring fiction. That same government has enabled over the past decade and more, the immigration, refugee acceptance and migrant haven claims to people Canada, with groups whose cultures and values are averse to Canada's. Yet their numbers are such that to offend them represents ballot box suicide.

 

That same government has willingly surrendered its obligation under the law to ensure equality and security for all its demographic population groups, in favour of abandoning the human rights of a smaller minority group for the encouragement of a larger minority group, irrespective of outcome. The result being that the Canadian Jewish population now finds itself under constant threat by the venomous actions of some segments of a vocal threatening, Jew-hating Muslim population, guided by Palestinian students on study visas in Canada.

 

When the Nakba exhibit can publish such incendiary statements as "Following the Hamas attack that killed about 1,200 people on October 7, 2023, Israel launched a large-scale military campaign in Gaza. Today, more than 240,000 people have been killed or injured, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health and UN agencies", without the realization that these figures, the omission of the fact that a terrorist group on Canada's own terror list, Hamas, is being quoted, leaving a public to digest these misconstrued statements as fact, Canada's government itself is complicit in furthering the agenda of Palestinian public relations. 

 

The situation is agonizingly blasphemous, taking place at the very institution in Winnipeg meant to ensure that the world not forget history as it was, the most dreadful human  tragedy enabled by lack of interest or any method of intervention to interrupt a Fascist death-cult from its Final Solution to destroy the lives of world Jewry by a dominant threat to world peace that almost succeeded in installing itself as a world-leading totalitarian presence of ubermensch in command of human rights everywhere. 

 

Gail Asper protested the exhibit ‘Nakba Past and Present” at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, June 26, 2026. (Credit: Izzie Helenchilde)