The Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) will open its controversial Nakba exhibit on June 27, and it isn't talking. "Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present" will explore what the CMHR describes as the "ongoing forced displacement and dispossession of Palestinians" through artwork, photographs, video testimonies and personal stories from Palestinian-Canadians.
Despite a formal legal threat from the Israeli advocacy group Shurat HaDin and calls from multiple Jewish organizations to pause and review the exhibit, the CMHR has largely deflected. The museum's spokesperson, Amanda Gaudes, and its CEO, Isha Khan, have provided brief written statements, but made no commitment to pause or alter the exhibit.
For a growing number of voices, including members of the family most responsible for the museum's very existence, the silence speaks volumes. The CMHR was the dream of the late Winnipeg media magnate and philanthropist Israel (Izzy) Asper. His family raised millions to build it, and it opened in 2014. His son, David Asper, a prominent Winnipeg lawyer and businessman, says what is unfolding at the institution is a betrayal of everything it was supposed to stand for.
'He would be disgusted'
"My dad never had a problem with telling the whole story," said Asper. "I think he'd be disgusted at how the telling of this story has become weaponized in the antisemitism game." For Asper, the exhibit is not simply a curatorial misstep; it is a symptom of a broader failure of institutional leadership and of a political class unwilling to take a stand. He says the exhibit perpetuates what he calls a victim-oppressor propaganda narrative, one that deliberately carves out the historical context of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
"The Palestinians were offered a state, their own state, and rejected it. Not only did they reject it, but they also attacked Israel and started a war. They lost the war. Start a war, lose a war and now I'm going to be the victim, just like October 7," he said.
Asper is equally critical of the museum's curatorial process. He pointed to the reported involvement of Ramsey Zeid, a committee member with a public record of anti-Zionist advocacy, as evidence that the process was compromised from the outset. "It's putting the fox in the henhouse," he said. "They were all partisans. There are historical facts that are facts, not feelings. We've moved into the realm of feelings, not facts."
He described the exhibit as the latest front in what he called a long-running and highly sophisticated propaganda effort, one that exploits western democratic values. "This is a highly, highly sophisticated, organized propaganda machine that has been making the Palestinians victims for a very, very long time," he said. "And now they've got the CMHR, hook, line and sinker, with no serious critical context or analysis."
