WINNIPEG, Manitoba — On June 27, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights will open Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present. The exhibit will be housed inside Canada’s national human rights museum and will shape public understanding of one of the most contested conflicts in modern history. It will influence educators, journalists, students, policymakers, and future cultural institutions. Whether one supports or opposes the exhibit is almost beside the point.
The exhibit itself is not the biggest story.
The biggest story is that Canada’s organized Jewish community failed to stop it, failed to substantially reshape it, and failed to secure what many community members believe would have been meaningful representation of Jewish historical experiences and perspectives.
That failure should trigger a long-overdue reckoning.
For nearly three years, Canadian Jews have lived through the worst surge of antisemitism in modern Canadian history. Since October 7, 2023, Jewish schools have been targeted. Synagogues have required heightened security. Jewish students have reported harassment on university campuses. Jewish businesses have been vandalized. Jewish Canadians have increasingly felt isolated in institutions that once claimed to welcome them.
Throughout this period, Canada’s major Jewish organizations repeatedly assured the community they were advocating on its behalf. They held conferences, issued statements, organized campaigns, raised funds, reassured donors, and spoke of access, relationships, influence, and engagement. The message was clear: experienced organizations were working behind the scenes to protect Jewish interests and ensure Jewish voices were heard.
Now comes the unavoidable question.
What exactly did all that influence achieve?
Because when the dust settles, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights will still be opening its Nakba exhibit.
The exhibit’s supporters succeeded.
The Jewish community’s leadership did not.
That is not a matter of opinion. That is the outcome.
And outcomes matter.
Leadership is not measured by press releases. Leadership is not measured by photo opportunities. Leadership is not measured by how many meetings were held behind closed doors. Leadership is measured by results.
The result is that one of Canada’s most influential public institutions is proceeding with an exhibit that generated significant concern within large segments of the Jewish community. The result is that many Jewish voices feel they were ignored. The result is that an exhibit years in development reached the finish line despite opposition from organizations whose primary purpose is to defend Jewish interests.
That is not success.
That is failure.
A profound failure.
Perhaps the most significant institutional failure of Canada’s organized Jewish leadership since October 7.
Some will argue that the exhibit could never have been stopped. Perhaps. Others will argue that the museum is independent. It is. Still others will say that advocacy efforts occurred behind the scenes. They probably did.
But those arguments miss the point.
If the exhibit could not be stopped, why wasn’t the community told that earlier? If meaningful changes were impossible, why weren’t expectations managed? If influence existed, where are the results? If years of advocacy produced no significant outcome, what exactly are donors funding?
Those are fair questions.
They are questions every donor, every volunteer, every synagogue member, and every Jewish family in Canada has the right to ask.
The deeper problem exposed by this controversy is not the exhibit itself. It is the growing gap between institutional claims and institutional effectiveness.
For decades, Jewish organizations positioned themselves as the voice of Canadian Jewry. They became professionalized. They became bureaucratized. They became sophisticated fundraising operations. Yet time and again, Canada’s Jewish community finds itself reacting to events rather than shaping them.
Universities.
School divisions.
Labour unions.
Municipal councils.
Professional associations.
Cultural institutions.
And now Canada’s national human rights museum.
The pattern is becoming impossible to ignore.
The organizations always have explanations.
What they increasingly lack are victories.
That should concern everyone.
The supporters of this exhibit understood something that Canada’s Jewish establishment appears to have forgotten. Institutions matter. Culture matters. Education matters. Public narratives matter.
What happens inside museums eventually influences classrooms. What happens inside classrooms eventually influences politics. What influences politics eventually shapes policy.
This battle was never just about a museum exhibit.
It was about public memory.
It was about legitimacy.
It was about whose story receives institutional recognition.
The people advocating for this exhibit understood that. They spent years pursuing their objective. They invested time, energy, relationships, and resources into achieving a specific goal.
Eventually, they succeeded.
That is what successful advocacy looks like.
The tragedy is not that activists succeeded in advancing their cause. Advocacy groups exist to advance causes. The tragedy is that Canada’s Jewish community discovered that those entrusted with defending its interests were unable to match that success.
The Jewish community deserves leadership capable of achieving comparable results.
Instead, it has increasingly been asked to accept failure as inevitable.
It is not.
No organization wins every battle. No leader succeeds every time. But leaders who expect trust must also accept accountability.
That means transparency.
That means honesty.
That means explaining what happened.
Who knew what and when?
What strategy was pursued?
What opportunities were missed?
What mistakes were made?
What lessons have been learned?
Most importantly, what will change going forward?
The community deserves answers.
Not talking points.
Not carefully crafted statements.
Not another fundraising appeal.
Answers.
The opening of the CMHR Nakba exhibit will be remembered for years. Not because of what hangs on the museum walls, but because it revealed a painful truth about the state of Jewish leadership in Canada.
The greatest threat exposed by this controversy is not the exhibit itself.
It is the possibility that Canada’s Jewish establishment has become far better at managing institutions than influencing them.
If that is true, then the community faces a far bigger challenge than any single museum exhibit.
And if that is true, then Canada’s Jewish community is owed more than explanations.
It is owed accountability.
It is owed transparency.
And yes, it is owed an apology.
An apology for failure.
An apology for complacency.
And an apology for asking the community to keep writing cheques while receiving diminishing results in return.
[Translated from a peacenick MK]
[Heb. Link]
Aryeh Lova Eliav, The Ladder of Israel: A Dream and Its Breakdown; A Socio-Political Analysis of Israel, Zmora-Bitan-Modan, 1976, pp. 41-44.
Let us make a reckoning – a true and terrible reckoning – with those Palestinian Arabs. Not only with the million or more Arabs who are under our rule, but with all of them. All those two and a half million Arabs who call themselves “sons of the Palestinian people” and who are now in the bosom of the Arab world that surrounds us.
Since our settlers, the first Zionists, set foot on the sandy and marshy land of the land a hundred years ago, the Arabs, the locals, harassed them, robbed them, plundered them, beat them, humiliated them (“Walad al-Mut”) and murdered them (I am not now doing the whole account with the Arabs and the Muslims regarding their attitude towards the Jews. This is a very long account, and it has very dark and terrible chapters. But it also has beautiful chapters in comparison to other cultures and peoples, among whom the Jews lived).
Thus the first Zionists spent the first decades, in constant fear of highwaymen, of murderers for the sake of plundering booty and of murderers for the sake of blood; and thus they were forced to create for themselves a self-defense belt, to teach their hands not only hard manual labor but also the bow [training with arns. See 2 Samuel 1:18]; and thus the first defense organizations arose for them and “Hashomer” at their head. This is how they lived. In the world of the “local Arabs”, where Turkish law supposedly ruled, but in reality the law of “every man for himself” of “blood vengeance” [might makes right/survival of the fittest], of “an eye for an eye” ruled.
The Jews quickly learned that if they did not rise up and kill those who rose up against them, the Palestinians would come, rob and murder them all.
All this – before an active and conscious Arab nationalism had taken shape. All this only because the Jews were “condemned to death” and it was good to kill them or at least rob them at every appropriate opportunity.
After World War I and after the ‘Balfour Declaration’, when the Arab-Palestinian national movement began to take shape – did not this movement use its darkest instincts to incite bloody riots and murder Jews (Zionists and not Zionists) in the Land of Israel?
The yeshiva students and with them women, children and infants, who were murdered, beheaded and slaughtered in Hebron during the events of 1929, were only one of the peaks in the wave of “Atbah al-Yahud”, which was now carried as a battle slogan not only by highwaymen, but by the murderers recruited by the Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini. This man had set himself the task of burning, killing, losing and destroying the Zionist enterprise at its peak and with it – all the Jews of Palestine.
These bloody events were followed by waves of other bloody “events”, greater and more terrible than them.
For three consecutive years – from 1936 to 1939 – the small Jewish community in Israel struggled with thousands of armed and organized Arabs, who harassed it, pillaged its isolated settlements, murdered women and children without batting an eyelid, raped women and slaughtered Jewish passers-by.
Moreover – since the First World War, from the beginning of the bloody path, where the blood of the Jews was shed here, the leaders of the Palestinian Arab national movement have committed an ancient sin, which haunts them to this day: the sin of unwillingness to compromise with the Jews on even one thing! On any part, on any piece of land. The Arabs, led by the Mufti, have repeatedly shown insane stubbornness.
And what is worse – they have murdered or threatened to murder every moderate Palestinian Arab who is ready to compromise (and there were such! And not a few! But they were mortally afraid of the sword of the fanatics, who have no restraints, and many, many of them were killed only because of their moderation).
The worst of all is also related to that ancient sin: the lack of understanding, the unwillingness to understand, even slightly and even for a moment, the other side. A terrible numbness and ignorance in relation to the Jews and in relation to Judaism, to the Zionists, and for Zionism, blind adherence to the clichés and slogans of “Jews to the sea”, “Jews are not a people” “Zionism serves British imperialism”. And from here – just one step to the fiery anti-Semitism of the Palestinian Arabs (Semites! Children of Ishmael!) towards Jews in Israel. And from here – just one step to education for revenge and blood, and to belief in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in the “blood libel” and in all the abominations that the [in] world has written about the Jews for hundreds and thousands of years.
No spark of understanding, no willingness to get along. to share. to compromise and live in peace alongside each other.
With the rise of the Nazis to power, they had the Mufti and his loyal allies – advisors to Hitler and his associates in the “Final Solution” of the extermination of the Jews.
And with what joy, with what joy in their hearts, most of the Palestinian Arabs received the news of the first defeats of the Allies, of the Nazi conquests and the mass murder of the Jews in Europe! Here is the one who did the “red, black work” for them: here is the one who annihilated their enemies!
And with the approaching War of Independence in the “five before twelve” of changing the face of the bloody history of the conflict, with the decision of the United Nations to give the remnant of the amputated Jewish people a piece of land, a small part of the land of its ancestors – did not the Palestinian Arabs accept the remnant of the Holocaust and the half million Jews who were then in the land, with bayonets, swords and bombs?
The fact that those who stood against them were remnants of the sword and those pursued by fate meant nothing to them. Everywhere, everywhere they could find their hands, they wanted to kill them and destroy them under the face of the sky.
And so, out of a lust for murder, out of a total lack of understanding, out of mixing and mingling and dragging Arab peoples into the boiling abyss, the Palestinian Arabs brought upon themselves the wrath and heroism of the Jews.
The desperate ones, who stood with their backs to the wall. And so the Palestinian Arabs brought upon themselves the wrath and the heroism of the desperate Jews, who stood with their backs to the wall. And so the Palestinian Arabs brought upon themselves the greatest tragedy in their history – their defeat, their hundreds of thousands of refugees.