PV Cultural Bureau
To judge by the many keffiyehs in the group, a large number of attendees at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ Annual Public Meeting in Winnipeg on November 19 were there to support the museum’s promised announcement of a new exhibition on the Nakba, the catastrophic ethnic cleansing of Palestine that commenced at a mass scale in 1948 at the hands of British colonialists and Zionists and continues today with Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians supported by the US and its allies including Canada.
The significance of the announcement of a Nakba exhibit at a federal museum, in a country whose government has and continues to support the genocide of Palestinians through ongoing provisions of arms and diplomatic reticence, should not be underestimated and is a win for the Palestine solidarity movement. To the former point, Canada has due to mounting public pressure now acknowledged Palestinian statehood in word but not deed, and has continued its trade relationship with Israel.
Such a groundbreaking exhibition within a federal forum is the result of persistent pressure, and signals a critical shift in the public understanding of the horrific reality that Palestinians have faced and continue to face at the hands of US imperialism as wielded through the brutal mechanisms of the Israeli state. Its nearing fruition is the important work of local Palestinians who have been pushing the museum for such an exhibit since its opening in 2013.
It remains to be seen however, whether the imperialist forces at the root of the Nakba will be identified by the exhibit, or whether the genocide of Palestinians will be referred to as such. “Our job isn’t to make statements,” Chief Executive Officer Isha Khan intoned in her explication of the museum’s role, but rather to work in hope that people see a reflected “shared humanity in the stories we tell on our walls and online.”
During the two-hour meeting, CMHR representatives discussed the museum at length with special focus on this role. Khan described museums in general as “trusted” spaces at a time when governments and media are under scrutiny and facing deep public mistrust, momentarily forgetting it seems, that the CMHR is an institution of the federal government, founded with hefty and ongoing Zionist backing of the co-founding Asper Foundation, and donors such as Scotiabank subsidiary 1832 Asset Management – a main investor in arms manufacturer Elbit Systems which supplies arms for Israel’s genocide.
Presented by officials as a community gathering place, one that the audience was encouraged to “return to again and again,” another official even described the CMHR – which charges $17-$22 admission fees to the majority of the public, and conference and gathering fees for the rental of its spaces, alongside a café and giftshop – as a “third space.”
It also mustn’t be forgotten that the CMHR was founded against the explicit wishes of Indigenous groups on its current site, and that it is situated on sacred Indigenous settlement and gathering territory atop partially excavated sacred Indigenous grounds.
So while a Nakba exhibition should be welcomed and celebrated, the CMHR should also be asked to contend with the difficult fact that the ethnic cleansing and Indigenous dispossession that are such an inherent part of the Nakba reality is the same genocidal practice that is ongoingly enacted against Indigenous peoples on the very lands upon which it currently sits, and by the very government that funds its existence. Such uneasy contradictions have of course dogged the museum since its founding.
As for the announcement, details were scant, but the exhibit will be titled “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past & Present” and officials stated that it would revolve around “art and storytelling” of Palestinians impacted by the catastrophe. There was no Q&A, but in conversation afterwards, the museum’s Vice President of Education and Public Affairs, and its Media Relations head explained that the exhibit is slated for early summer 2026 and that it is scheduled as a two-year exhibit, with a future beyond that to be determined.
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