Installation view of Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present inside the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg. Photo by Annie Kierans/Canadian Museum for Human Rights

It has been quite the brouhaha since a tiny, non-permanent exhibit on Palestine launched at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg in June. Considering the decade-old accusations levelled at the museum for indulging competitive victimhood, by prioritizing the Nazi extermination of European Jewry over other crimes against humanity, one assumes two modest panels on Palestine are an overdue contribution to redressing such racial scaling. This, after all, is a human rights, not a Holocaust, museum.

The fuss, though, is not about the exhibits’ incommensurability (a whopping 4,500 square feet versus 12 linear metres), but about the museum’s audacity in representing the Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, of 1947-49—when 750,000 Palestinians were violently driven off their land by Zionist militias and prevented from returning, resulting in the collapse of Palestinian society.

The Nakba, the incremental annihilation of Palestinians since the onset of the Zionist movement, describes a before and after 1948. Tasked with capturing a sedimentation of unpunished crimes over a nearly 150-year span and counting, it is evolving into a legal concept able to account for unremitting atrocities culminating today in holocide—the annihilation of a people and their land. It welcomes neither Zionist determinations of its historical and forensic scope nor recycled myths long put to rest by historians. Responding, however, to calls for “contextual integrity,” I would like to focus on the most jarring.

The exhibit allegedly fails to address a contested, contentious, complex conflict

Hardly anything is less “complicated” than settler-colonial domination. A civil war is complex; a confederation can be contentious; warring countries will have contested borders. But settler colonies are, by the colonists’ own admission, about expropriating and replacing the native. The sole baroque component here is its compound nature: British colonialism over Zionist colonization. A double tap of sorts. Let’s whip out “historical accuracy” then.

Right after the first World Zionist Congress in 1897, the Zionist movement began building institutions to finance and facilitate Jewish settlement in Palestine. The Jewish Colonial Trust was established as its financial arm. During the British Mandate, the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association administered settlements and land acquired by its predecessor, the Jewish Colonization Association, while organizations such as the Jewish National Fund and Palestine Land Development Company acquired additional land for Jewish settlement.

These institutions reflected a broader political project openly........

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