Breach of trust: How a ‘Nakba’ exhibit roiled Canada’s rights museum — and the woman who helped build it

When Gail Asper started drawing up the initial plans for the Canadian Museum of Human Rights in the early 2000s, her efforts prompted numerous ethnic communities and political interest groups to start vying for special consideration.

Indigenous leaders wanted a particular focus on missing and murdered women. Ukrainian Canadian groups campaigned for acknowledgement of Canada’s imprisonment of their people during the First World War, and of later Soviet Union attacks against Ukraine in the 1930s. By the time the Winnipeg-based museum opened in 2014, it had seemingly become a magnet for every activist cause under the sun, setting off clusters of criss-crossing protest.

Despite the tumult, Asper said the museum was able to keep its grand opening relatively quiet through regular consultation with the various groups.

“There were a lot of concerns before we opened, for sure, but we opened smoothly because we did all the work and we listened, and we changed, we revised, we respected communities’ concerns,” Asper said.

But 12 years after its launch, the Canadian Museum of Human Rights (CMHR) finds itself embroiled in the very sort of prolonged controversy it had long avoided.

In June, the museum unveiled an exhibit called “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present,” which describes the experiences of Palestinian people who were forced from their homes starting after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and continuing to today. The exhibit kicked off a loud public outcry, especially from the Jewish community, over what many view as the curator’s failure to include relevant facts about the ongoing conflict and the impact it’s had on Jewish people.

Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture Marc Miller, whose department oversees the CMHR, has weighed in with his own criticism of the “Nakba” exhibit, saying it has “errors” that “must be rectified.” A CMHR board member resigned due to what he saw as the exhibit’s lack of intellectual rigour, thrusting it further into controversy.

The matter has been particularly troubling for Asper, the daughter of former Canadian media magnate Israel “Izzy” Asper, who was critical in establishing the museum. The Asper Foundation donated the initial $24 million to get the museum off the ground, and organizers behind the effort lobbied three separate prime ministers — Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin and Stephen Harper — to push the project forward.

Years later, she worries that public concerns about the exhibit’s alleged slant could taint the standing of the public institution, which is majority funded by the federal government.

“My dad always said the most important asset you have is your reputation,” Asper said.

“I think that this exhibit is going to have a lot of people lose faith in the museum’s trustworthiness for being an honest purveyor of accurate historical and current-day information.”

She said the museum piece “deliberately omits key, relevant facts about the conflict” that are crucial to understanding its full context.

“It’s inaccurate, and in my opinion shows bias on the part of the curators of the museum, and is not at the level of scholarship befitting a federal institution.”

Placed along a brief 12-metre stretch of the towering seven-story museum, the Nakba exhibit includes a collection of photos, video testimonies, family heirlooms and artworks that describe the plight of Palestinian people who have fled ongoing conflict in the region. Among the artifacts are things like keys to Palestinian homes that the owners left behind, and an orange peel from a former Palestinian family-run orchard that was abandoned amid the chaos of war.

The exhibit begins at the Arab-Israeli war in 1948 — when Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Syria invaded Israel in response to the United Nations partition that had established the new Israeli nation — and ends in the current day. Around 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes due to the war launched by five Arab nations. The mass displacement has been dubbed the Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe.”

Some argue that the photos, items and testimonies tell a woefully one-sided story. Mark Berlin, a former CMHR board member who quit the role over the exhibit, said Jewish people have been all but scrubbed out of the exhibit, and is calling on the museum to make corrections.

Roughly 850,000 Jews in the region have also been forced to flee their homes due to ongoing strife, Berlin points out, but those people are never mentioned in the exhibit. Berlin also notes that more than two million Arab people still live in Israel today, a fact that he said could have offered useful context.

“The story of the Nakba is a complex one,” he said. “It’s not reduced to a quick little soundbite. There’s a lot of nuance with it, there’s a lot of history that preceded it, and a lot of history that developed over the years of the Nakba.”

Berlin also takes issue with the portion related to the modern-day displacement of Palestinian people. The exhibit mentions the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre that kicked off the latest war in Gaza, but victims of the mass killing are referred to vaguely as “people,” and not as Jewish Israelis who were targeted for their Jewish heritage.

“Hamas terrorists launched the greatest large-scale massacre against Jewish civilians since World War II, where over 1,160 or so Jewish babies and children and mothers and young people were brutally murdered in the most horrific fashion,” he said. “The failure to describe that horror, and then simply say, ‘Oh, ya, these people were displaced,” is an error in judgment.”

CMHR chief executive Isha Khan defended the Nakba exhibit, saying it was explicitly designed to show the experience of a specific group of people through stories of its suffering.

“The frame, or the scope, of the exhibit is to centre Palestinian experiences of forced displacement,” she said. “So, it’s told through their stories, through their lens, and that’s an approach the museum takes in a variety of other places.”

Previous exhibits that existed in the same physical space as the Nakba had similarly focused on the experiences of specific people, Khan said. One such exhibit focused on the plight of Syrian refugees, another on the sex trafficking of two Ugandan girls.

Khan said that those displays shouldn’t be understood to come at the expense of other groups or other stories, and noted that the Nakba is just one of many exhibits in the museum — including a large gallery dedicated to the Jewish holocaust.

Khan said the museum’s leadership “share the concern around rising antisemitism,” and said they are currently reviewing some of the complaints against the Nakba exhibit. She did not confirm whether it would change the exhibit in response to those complaints. The brief texts displayed alongside photos and artifacts have been rigorously fact-checked, she said.

“Every word in the exhibit is backed up by credible research,” she said. “We had our research sources academically reviewed internally, and then we took an additional step to have them reviewed externally.”

She said the museum is planning a future exhibit that focuses on Jewish people.

Critics, including Asper, Berlin and Gail Lord — a long-time museum planner who was also crucial in establishing the CMHR — all said that they weren’t opposed in principle to an exhibit that focuses on Palestinian victims. However, they said that the Palestinian-Israeli issue is uniquely sensitive and politically fraught, and therefore deserving of equal treatment in any exhibit.

The three also pointed to what they view as shortcomings on the part of the museum’s board of directors, led by chair Benjie Nycum, to properly assess the details of the exhibit before it went public.

Berlin said board members were hesitant to press the executive team and curators for more information about the exhibit, with a few members quietly raising concerns about not knowing more details before it went public. However, about three-quarters of members were either supportive or neutral toward the exhibit, and Berlin said his worries about how it might be received were broadly dismissed.

Khan said the leadership team regularly discussed the exhibit with board members before it went public.

The Nakba exhibit was curated by Isabelle Masson, and Shayna Plaut acted as its director of research. The National Post tried to contact Masson and Plaut through the museum, but its request to interview them was not addressed.

Nycum did not respond directly to the National Post’s questions. In a written statement attributed to Nycum, the museum’s spokesperson said the board’s duties consisted of managing the museum’s strategic direction, handling resources, monitoring performance and reporting to the federal government. The statement said the “board supports the museum’s approach taken with respect to this exhibit.”

Asper, who has an honorary position on the board but no voting power, said the situation suggests there was a failure of governance on the part of the board for not having better oversight of the issue.

“I think that the board clearly didn’t understand the risks of doing inaccurate exhibits on volatile subjects,” she said. “They didn’t understand the impact it could have on their reputation, or they were indifferent, or they were too deferential to management.”

The human rights museum’s governance systems have faced scrutiny before. In 2018, the Auditor General found “weakness” in the museums systems and procedures for ensuring that “content was balanced and accurate.”

Weeks after the exhibit was unveiled, it’s unclear whether the museum will make alterations down the road. Khan said that while they are reviewing complaints, they will “move at the pace of a museum, which is deliberate and thoughtful and intentional.” The CMHR hasn’t yet issued a public statement on the exhibit itself.

A spokesperson for Minister Miller said that it “is not the role of the federal government to dictate programming at Canada’s national museums.”

Asper, whose father had the initial idea to build the CMHR, said the reticence on the part of the museum is disappointing.

Earlier this week, Asper announced that her family was temporarily pulling any funding for the museum over the exhibit. She told the National Post that she was also considering stepping down from her honorary board position.