Fouad Sahyoun flips through replicas of his grandfather’s property deeds from the early 1900s, documents connected to buildings in Haifa his family hasn’t returned to after fleeing the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
“We were never allowed to go back. So, we lost our properties [and] our bank accounts, our furniture, our cars and our identity,” the Palestinian Canadian told CBC News on Friday.
The original documents are part of the new Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, which is set to open publicly Saturday after four years of development.
The collection explores the displacement of around 750,000 Palestinians during Israel’s establishment — an event also known as Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe” — and the consequences for the generations that followed.
“After 78 years, we’re able to tell our story … at such a high level in public,” Sahyoun said.
He says he hopes the exhibit will lead to public pressure on the federal government to take action.
“We have to go back home,” Sahyoun said. “We can read about trauma and displacement, we can hear about bombardment, but the eventual aim [is] justice has to be made.”
CBC News got an early look at the exhibit in Winnipeg on Friday. The contents have been largely under wraps until now.
It includes an interactive “memory box” encasing artifacts such as the Sahyoun property deeds, as well as traditional Palestinian embroidery and a pair of keys to a home Winnipeg resident Rana Abdulla’s family was expelled from in what is now Israel.
“These objects are related to personal stories of displacement and disposition. And what is interesting is that we created reproductions of the objects, so that when visitors come, they can touch and decide which films they would like to listen to,” exhibit curator Isabelle Masson said.
“We came to this project with an awareness that Palestinian voices are often marginalized, spoken over or even silenced.”
Masson’s curatorial approach focused on centering Palestinian Canadian voices and lived experiences while “resisting from the dehumanization that Palestinians face,” Masson said.
“This is not only about the past, what happened in 1948, it’s about an ongoing experience, and so the exhibit creates a continuing conversation between past and present.”
It’s a relatively small exhibit housed in the museum’s gallery on the fifth floor, which focuses on contemporary human rights. That hasn’t stopped it from attracting big controversy.
The exhibit has drawn criticism from Jewish Canadian organizations for a lack of consultation during its development and for not acknowledging the estimated 850,000 Jews who were expelled from Arab countries in the wake of Israel’s creation.
Mark Berlin, a professor at McGill University with a background in human rights law, argued the exhibit will fuel anti-Jewish hate in Canada when he resigned from the museum’s board of directors this week.
“I do think there has been an activist ideological narrative being put forward by the creation team by omitting certain factual truths about the history of the time, and to me, that’s problematic,” Berlin, who was the board’s only Jewish member, told CBC News on Wednesday.
Berlin was not able to view the contents of the exhibit before he resigned, he said.
The displacement of Jews after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war has been acknowledged elsewhere in the museum since its inception.
Human rights museum board member resigns over ‘one-sided’ exhibit on displaced Palestinians
Palestinian exhibit at human rights museum to open next week amid criticism
A multimedia gallery on the second floor that introduces visitors to a timeline of human rights through 100 selected historical moments says that “before, during and after the war, hundreds of thousands of people became refugees.”
“These included Palestinian Arabs as well as Jews from surrounding countries.”
The gallery also acknowledges that Arab leaders rejected a 1947 United Nations resolution calling for Palestine, then under control of the British government, to be divided into Arab and Jewish states.
Isha Khan, the museum’s CEO, says she wants people to come and see the Nakba exhibit for themselves.
“So much of the critique has come from people who haven’t seen it, and have fears about what it is and what it could be,” she said.
“We’ve tried to explain and rationalize why this exhibit is about Palestinian Canadians, about the human rights impacts that they’ve faced over generations, and why it belongs here in this museum in its current form.”
The purpose of the display was not to pit two communities against each other, Khan said.
“This is about our shared humanity and really, sharing one community’s experiences,” she said. “It doesn’t negate that Jewish people have faced displacement and been impacted by that, or certainly that they’re experiencing record levels of antisemitism today.”
The exhibit is meant to address longstanding concerns Palestinian Canadians and their experiences have been underrepresented in the museum’s galleries, she said.
“It helps us understand what the impacts of forced displacement are, and Palestinian Canadian stories belong in our collective memory, and that’s what museums like ours do.”
