The Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg. Photo by Robert Linsdell/Wikimedia Commons.

“Facts Not Feelings.” “History Is Not a Storybook.” “Teach the Past, Don’t Change the Past.” These were some of the signs that pro-Israel protesters brought to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg on the opening night of Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present, the first exhibition in a national museum dedicated to the 1948 dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians.

The founding act of the State of Israel, the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”), unfolded during the 1947-49 war surrounding Israel’s creation and saw Zionist militias destroy 530 Palestinian villages and cities, displacing some 750,000 Palestinians and killing around 15,000, many in brutal massacres. The war diaries of Israel’s founder, David Ben-Gurion, contain a call to “wipe out” Palestinian communities. The creation of Israel was also the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the rejection of Palestinian personhood, nationhood, and culture. This is a reality that Israel and its supporters, including Western governments, still refuse to acknowledge.

The modest Nakba exhibition in Winnipeg was created following decades of lobbying by Palestinian Canadians and advocates for Palestinian rights—not to mention years of opposition from supporters of Israel, including an attempted court injunction to halt the exhibition’s opening and baseless accusations of “foreign interference” following a meeting between museum officials and Mona Abuamara, the Palestinian ambassador to Canada.

The exhibition begins with excerpts from the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and artworks by Malak Mattar, a young Palestinian artist from Gaza. In restrained language, the panels touch on the mass displacement of Palestinians during the Nakba and connect this violence to the continued colonial atrocities inflicted by Israeli forces on Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. A display shows objects related to Palestinian history and........

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