The Canadian Museum for Human Rights has just opened its long-awaited exhibit on the Nakba, titled Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present. The Museum has worked closely with the Palestinian Canadian community to develop this groundbreaking resource, while the broader Palestine movement has been tirelessly advocating for Nakba recognition in schools, cultural spaces, and in Parliament.

The Nakba, or the Catastrophe, marks the forced expulsion, displacement, and ethnic cleansing of around 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homeland in 1948 during the creation of the state of Israel. For Palestinians, the Nakba never ended, as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank continue to be displaced through Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaigns and ever-expanding settlements. 

However, the Israeli lobby has been relentlessly attacking this exhibit in an attempt to silence Palestinian voices, and is exerting major pressure on Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture Mark Miller to have the exhibition cancelled. Miller initially declined to interfere with the Museum’s programming, but has recently made comments disparaging the exhibit, alleging that it has “errors” and “failures” that “must be rectified.”

This is an alarming threat to the independence of the Museum and its ability to tell human rights stories without political interference, and gives fuel to the extremist voices who want to silence Palestinians.

Join us in emailing Minister Miller to let him know that he is wrong to say that the Nakba exhibit has “errors” that must be “rectified.” We must demand that he stand by his initial support for museum independence and support its work in telling the stories of Palestinian Canadians.