Arab residents being forced out of Haifa by Haganah militiamen, April 1948. Photo from the Bettmann Archive.

Since the opening of Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg, the exhibition has been the target of a coordinated campaign of political pressure and misinformation. Long before Minister Marc Miller publicly questioned and criticized the exhibition, organizations such as the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) had spent months campaigning against it, while others, including the Tel Aviv-based organization Shurat HaDin, threatened legal action against the CMHR.

Minister Miller’s remarks did not begin this campaign, but they gave it the weight and legitimacy of the federal government.

As a member of the Palestinian Content Advisory Network (PCAN), which reviewed the content of the exhibition, I feel it is my duty to respond to the minister’s remarks and to correct the many fallacies that have been repeated.

A few days after the exhibition opened, Minister Miller stated that the exhibition contains “errors in curation [that] should be rectified.” Unfortunately, it appears that the minister chose to comment not on the exhibition itself, but on a distorted version of it, shaped by political pressure rather than by its actual content.

What does the minister mean when he suggests that parts of the exhibition require correction? On what basis does a federal minister presume the authority to decide which elements of Palestinian history should be presented and which should not? Is Minister Miller known for his scholarship on Palestine and its people? Has he ever written even a single scholarly word........

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