Bryan Schwartz: Canadian Museum for Human Rights is gaslighting us with 'Nakba' exhibit

WINNIPEG — Maintaining a Jewish identity demands time, spirit and energy: connecting with millennia worth of history, studying the traditions, passing them to our children and contributing to the wider society while never abandoning who we are. Yet in the midst of all this, Jews are constantly forced on the defensive, fending off attacks from all sides. The latest example: the Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ (CMHR) plan to open a new exhibit called “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present.”

Why is the CMHR uncritically adopting the term “Nakba,” which translates to “catastrophe,” when that supposed catastrophe includes the establishment of the State of Israel and the failure of invading Arab armies to destroy it? How is any such suggestion consistent with the idea of “two states for two peoples,” with current Canadian policy or with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, which was adopted by the Government of Canada?

Canadian Jews invested huge sums of money and hope in the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The idea was constructive: teach tolerance, promote understanding, build a better future for all. Many Jews wanted a Holocaust gallery. There an objective reason for a Canadian museum to focus on it, because the Holocaust was the crucial inspiration for our current international human-rights laws. Yet the museum largely ignores this truth.

Its presentation of the Holocaust is underwhelming, omits the grand mufti of Jerusalem’s support for Nazi Germany’s quest to annihilate the Jews and does not bother to mention that Jew-hatred, including from Arab quarters, blocked escape to the Jewish homeland. There is no positive word about Israel as the haven for Jews fleeing not only Europe, but vicious, often violent, persecution in the Islamic world. Around half of Israeli Jews today come from Africa and the Islamic world, not Europe. Now the CMHR planning to create a “Nakba” exhibit, without any of the broad public consultations that shaped the Holocaust gallery.

I introduced the teaching of Indigenous oral history to my law school at the University of Manitoba. Preserving voices is valuable, but framing matters. Memory can be influenced by shared political views, such as the view that Israel is illegitimate; that all of “Palestine” inherently belongs to Arabs or Muslims; that Palestinian suffering is unrelated to the Arab invasion of Israel, ignoring that surrounding Arab countries took over the Palestinian territories, not Israel, and that almost all of them refused to give citizenship to the residents of the areas and instead exploited the plight of those displaced to maintain a living grievance against the very existence of Israel.

Context matters. Will the exhibit say anything about how the Jewish people are indigenous to the Land of Israel and have maintained a continuous presence there for millennia, or anything positive about Israel at all? Basic truths deserve recognition. In 1948, Israel accepted the United Nations’ painful partition and, in its Declaration of Independence, welcomed Arabs to stay in peace and equality. Arab states invaded. Had they succeeded, Jewish civilization would likely have been propelled into ultimate extinction. Israel later offered numerous comprehensive peace deals, but the Palestinians refused. In 2005, Israel left Gaza entirely. Hamas turned it into a terror fortress, culminating in the October 7 massacre.

Two-million Arab citizens remain in Israel — 21 per cent of the population — with the highest life expectancy in the Arab world, constitutionally protected equal rights as individuals and language and education protections as a national minority. Meanwhile, almost a million Jews were ethnically cleansed from Arab lands. There are almost no Jews left anywhere in the Islamic world. And where, by the way, in the Middle East are Christians thriving apart from in Israel?

If the museum wants to tell a Canadian story, how about adding the story of the Jews who were displaced by the Holocaust, went to Israel only to find it under attack from neighbouring states and came to Canada to find peace — yet are now discovering that public schools, universities and national cultural institutions like the CBC and the CMHR are fraught with hostility toward Israel and Jews?

Instead, the museum continues to de-link the Shoah from the creation of the whole international human-rights system, refuses to portray Israel in a positive light and is barrelling ahead with an exhibit intended to delegitimize Israel and draw a false equivalence between the “Nakba” and the Holocaust. The CMHR has now joined with many other institutions in promoting a narrative that might as well be called “enough about the gassing, let’s proceed with the gaslighting” — this, from an institution that Jews helped to build in the hope that it would contribute to genuine education and tolerance.

If the CMHR wants to instead pursue balance and non-discrimination, it could at least prepare an exhibit on the indigeneity of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel. It could tell an astounding, true story about a people who founded a small nation in a tiny land at the crossroads of three continents, and built a civilization that has contributed to the foundations of faith, culture, science and political morality, including the belief in universal human rights.

It could tell the story of a tiny people who survived imperialist and colonialist invasion after invasion — Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Greek, Roman, jihadist, Ottoman, European — and maintained a presence in their homeland throughout. Much of them were dispersed, but persecuted fragments from around the world returned, survived rejectionist wars of attempted annihilation and built a democracy that is at the forefront of science and technology.

Anyone who looks at the history of the Jewish people in good faith, with an open mind, and not through the lens of ancient hatreds conflated with contemporary “progressive” ones, might stop and recognize one of the most improbable and inspiring anticolonial projects in the history of the world.

National Post

Bryan Schwartz is a professor of law at the University of Manitoba and holds a rabbinical ordination from the Jewish Spiritual Leaders Institute.