The Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg, Manitoba, has been threatened with legal action by an Israeli organisation over its upcoming exhibition on the Nakba, the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948.
On its website, the Tel Aviv-based Shurat Hadin describes itself as a “unique and innovative activist organisation that has chartered a powerful new dimension to pro-Israel advocacy”. It announced on 15 May that it had sent a legal letter to the museum’s board of trustees and senior leadership regarding the upcoming exhibition, calling for it to be paused in order to conduct an “independent legal and scholarly review”.
According to an article in the National Post, the letter alleges the Winnipeg museum is promoting a politically one-sided narrative that could fuel antisemitism and violate Canadian federal law. It also alleges that the museum, which receives funding from the federal government, is failing in its mandate as an educational institution by presenting what it describes as an unbalanced portrayal of the 1948 creation of Israel and the displacement of Palestinians. The exhibition, Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present, is due to open on 27 June.
Contacted by The Art Newspaper, a spokesperson for the CMHR said the museum is “reviewing the letter” but declined to comment further.
A spokesperson for Shurat Hadin shared the organisation’s original press release about the letter, which includes a statement from its president, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner.
“Publicly funded institutions have a responsibility to approach contested historical issues with fairness, balance, and intellectual integrity, and only in accordance with their mandate,” Darshan-Leitner stated. “A national human rights museum cannot become a platform for politicised narratives that risk contributing to division and misunderstanding including here by erasing Jewish history, delegitimising Jewish self-determination or contributing to hostility against the Jewish community.”
While Shurat Hadin’s website does not list any legal actions taken against museums, it does mention past actions such as “blocking a hostile flotilla intent on breaching the Israeli coastal blockade of Gaza by warning maritime insurance carriers and a satellite communication company that providing services to the flotilla could subject them to legal liability for aiding terrorists”. The organisation also claims to monitor “rampant anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in academic institutions by informing the school of its potential civil and criminal liability for tolerating an environment of intimidation and hostility that fails to protect Jewish and Israeli students from anti-Semitic harassment” as well as using the legal system to counter boycotts against Israeli companies and academics “by seeking to remove the tax exempt status of organizations that promote boycotts.”
This appears to be the first time a Canadian museum has been threatened by Shurat Hadin. It is also the first time a Canadian museum has devoted an exhibition to the Nakba from the perspective of Palestinian Canadian survivors.
“The CMHR tells stories of human rights abuses and violations from the perspective of the victims of those abuses,” a spokesperson for the Winnipeg chapter of the group Independent Jewish Voices tells The Art Newspaper. “The Nakba, the catastrophe that is marked by Palestinians on 15 May, is an opportunity for Palestinians to share with the world a defining moment in their history. The telling of this history is exactly the sort of stories that Canada’s premier human rights museum should be telling.”
With more than a month to go before its opening date, there is relatively little publicly available information about the content of Palestine Uprooted. A page on the CMHR website about the exhibition states in part, regarding the 1948 Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”): “At least 750,000 people were expelled by militias and the Israeli military or fled as the conflicts grew. Most of those who were displaced believed they would return in a few days or weeks. Five generations later, these people and their descendants still live with insecurity and uncertainty and are unable to return home.” The exhibition, the website continues, “explores the human rights violations related to the ongoing forced displacement and dispossession of Palestinians” and will incorporate the video testimonies and personal items of Palestinian Canadians, as well art, photography and text.
When CMHR first publicly announced it was planning Palestine Uprooted late last year, the news was met with dueling choruses of support and opposition.
“A Palestinian Content Advisory Network has been working with the museum in an advisory capacity; however, the museum retains final authority over all content,” Ramsey Zeid, the president of the Canadian Palestinian Association of Manitoba and the descendant of Nakba survivors, told The Art Newspaper at the time. “This project has been in development for nearly four years and will present the story of the Nakba. It is an exhibit created for Palestinians, centring Palestinian narratives with the goal of educating the broader public.”
