Human rights museum’s Palestinian displacement exhibit ‘falls short of the facts,’ report claims

A new study claims that the Nakba exhibit at the Canadian Human Rights Museum “falls short of the facts,” arguing that the displacement of Palestinian people was the result of a complex conflict that forced hundreds of thousands of Jews and Arabs alike from their homes.

In a report co-written by David Bercuson and Logan Jaspers for the Calgary-based Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, the authors lay out a detailed history of the causes and effects of the 1948 Israeli-Arab war, which triggered a massive refugee crisis whose effects continue to define the region.

The study comes after the Winnipeg-based museum, which is majority funded by the federal government, has come under scrutiny in recent weeks for its exhibit about the displacement of Palestinian people. The “Nakba” — Arabic for “catastrophe” — describes the displacement of some 750,000 Palestinian people following the 1948 Israeli-Arab war.

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Critics have said that the exhibit focuses too centrally on the plight of Palestinian refugees, while glossing over or failing to describe the similar experiences of Jewish peoples, who were also displaced during the conflict.

“The popular view of the Nakba presented by the Canadian Human Rights Museum falls short of the facts regarding events in Palestine following the U.N. partition vote of 1947,” the authors of the Aristotle study write in their opening remarks.

The pair argue that Palestinian displacement was partly the result of “weak leadership and military unpreparedness” of the Arab nations who were at war with the newly founded nation of Israel, among a long list of other factors. The authors also point out that Israeli refugees who fled conflict in the 1940s were welcomed in Israel and eventually assimilated, while Arab refugees were treated as “symbols of the heartlessness and murderous intent of the Jews.”

That in turn created a lasting divergence between the experience of the two groups, the authors argue. In the years following the 1948 war, the authors said by way of example, Iraq began placing “restrictions on Jewish life, commerce [and] religious practice,” causing many Jews to seek refuge in Israel.