The Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg. Photo by Ken Lund/Flickr.

The pushback against the “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present” temporary exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights was given an extra boost in the final days of July, as Gail Asper, daughter of Izzy Asper, who spearheaded the campaign to establish the CMHR, gave interviews to multiple local and national news organizations about her family’s decision to pause financial support for the museum over the exhibit. The Asper Foundation, which had been preparing to donate $50,000 to support the museum’s Holocaust exhibit, has now put that donation on hold.

Asper has been front and centre in the protests against the Nakba exhibition—which runs from July 27, 2026, to November 30, 2028—and was photographed prominently at a Zionist protest outside the museum on the evening of the exhibition’s opening event, holding a blue-and-white placard reading “Nothing about us/Without us.” Now, with commentary about the controversy appearing to die down, Asper has broadcast her family’s decision to pause financial support for the CMHR in separate interviews with the CBC, Winnipeg Free Press, and National Post.

In all these interviews, Asper repeated the supposedly ‘troubling’ issue with the CMHR’s representation of the Palestinian Nakba, a line that has been heavily trodden since the museum first announced the exhibit in November 2025: the exhibit lacks “context.” Carol Sanders of the Winnipeg Free Press articulated both the argument and its many proponents in her coverage of Asper’s withdrawal of financial support: “What’s missing, said Asper and others, including former federal Justice Minister Irwin Cottler and former CMHR board member and human rights lawyer Mark Berlin—who co-authored a column about it for the Globe and Mail, is context.” The significance of this oft-cited objection is that it conveys the false premise that Zionists have no fundamental objection to the Nakba being represented at the CMHR; their objections have to do with the contextual framing of the event. Indeed, in an August 6 letter to the editor of the Winnipeg Free Press defending her position, Asper plainly states: “To be absolutely clear, almost all critics, including me, agree that this is true, and Palestinian stories should be told.” She then reiterated that her objection is strictly based on “the false depiction of historical events and the omission of important facts from the exhibit.”

The “important facts” and “context” consistently cited as “missing” from the exhibit refer—as the authors of an open letter from B’nai Brith Canada stated as early as November 2025—to a........

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