For a relatively small display, the 11-metre-long exhibition Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg has garnered an unprecedented amount of attention leading up to and since its opening on 27 June. Before its unveiling it elicited a threat of legal action against the CMHR from an Israeli organisation, and now controversy over the exhibition has entered the arena of Canadian federal politics.
On 29 June, the Canadian heritage minister Marc Miller said in an interview with the Canadian Press that the CMHR made “an error” in its presentation of an exhibit about displaced Palestinians. “It isn’t up to me to speak to, or insert myself in, the curation of any particular exhibit,” Miller said. “But manifestly, you cannot deny the fact that this is an exhibit that is born in controversy—and perhaps some of it could have been avoided.”
Miller, who visited the Winnipeg museum on 25 June, said there are flaws in the exhibition that should be addressed. “There are some words in there that are regrettable,” he told the Canadian Press. “Not identifying Hamas as a terrorist organisation is, I think, a failure. And not clearly stating that, for example, Hamas intended to kill Jews is, I think, an unfortunate error in curation and should be rectified.”
Campaigns by conservative Jewish groups have suggested the exhibition needs to include more information about Arab states expelling Jews in the 1940s, a subject that has been highlighted for years in another display on the museum’s second floor. Miller did not weigh in on this. He also suggested that members of the museum’s board were not given a chance to see the exhibition before it opened to the public.
“You could layer on many other complexities in and around 1948, leading up to the present day,” the minister added. “But I do have to be careful as the minister in charge of an independent organisation like the museum.”
On 30 June, the federal leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP), Avi Lewis, wrote in a statement on social media that Miller’s comments constituted “unacceptable political interference” in the museum’s programming and called on him to “retract his comments, apologise and leave curating to the curators”.
“This is completely out of line,” Lewis wrote. “Minister Miller says, ‘It isn't up to me to speak to, or insert myself in, the curation of any particular exhibit.’ And then he does exactly that.” Lewis added: “His comments are a direct attack on the independence of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights […] exactly what the Museums Act is meant to prevent.”
Lewis also affirmed that “The story of the Nakba needs to be told. It’s a hard history to confront: Israel’s independence was achieved with massacres, ethnic cleansing, and the forcible displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians. And it’s a story that’s not over: all of those assaults on human dignity and fundamental human rights continue to this day.”
Rorie McLeod, the CMHR’s director of public affairs, tells The Art Newspaper that Miller’s office has “shared his concern with us”. He adds, in response to Miller’s comments: “We have referred to Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack as a terrorist attack on numerous occasions. Second, there is no doubt that the intent of the attack was to murder Jewish people. There were people of other nationalities and religious identities who were also murdered by Hamas on 7 October, which informed the use of the word ‘people’ in our exhibit text.”
McLeod also counters Miller’s claim that the board was not able to see the exhibition before it opened. “The board of trustees serves as a governance body and is regularly briefed on the museum’s plan for exhibits,” he says. “That happened repeatedly including presentations on the interpretive plan, schematic design and detailed reports about risk associated with the exhibit.”
According to McLeod, the museum is collecting feedback about the exhibition. “We have an established content revision process within our curation team, and we have forwarded the minister’s concerns to that process for consideration.”
Harold Shuster, an organiser with the group Independent Jewish Voices’ Winnipeg chapter, said in a statement: “Miller is simply pandering to the Jewish institutional voices that have pulled out all stops to try and get this exhibit shut down. The minister should take his own advice and keep his nose out of the affairs of the CMHR. The museum, its curator and the advisory group have followed all the protocols and told the story of the Nakba as lived and remembered by those who experienced it.”
Competing campaigns in support of and opposing the exhibition have each garnered more than 11,000 signatures as of this writing.
- Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present, until 30 November 2028, Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Winnipeg