Philanthropist behind Canadian human rights museum says family pausing funding over Palestinian exhibit

A Winnipeg philanthropist who played a critical role in bringing the Canadian Museum for Human Rights to the city says her family is pausing any financial support for the institution over concerns around an exhibit on the displacement of Palestinians.

Gail Asper said she found elements of the exhibit — titled Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present — compelling, from interviews with displaced Palestinians to artifacts including people’s property deeds and keys for their former homes.

But she feels the way the museum describes the related history on panels in the exhibit is missing context.

The collection explores the Nakba — Arabic for “catastrophe,” and the term Palestinians use to describe Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948, which led to the displacement of approximately 750,000 Palestinians.

The exhibit drew criticism even before it opened at the national museum last month, including from some Jewish Canadian organizations who said there was a lack of consultation during its development, and that it fails to acknowledge the estimated 850,000 Jews who were expelled from Arab countries in the wake of Israel’s creation. 

In a recent interview with CBC, Asper echoed that concern and raised others about details she said were missing from the relatively small exhibit — like that Canada has listed militant group Hamas as a terrorist entity, and that Arab leaders rejected a 1947 United Nations resolution for Palestine, then under control of the British government, to be divided into Arab and Jewish states.

While the displacement of Jews in the wake of Israel’s creation and the Arab rejection of the UN resolution are acknowledged elsewhere in the museum, Asper said she fears not having that context included in the Nakba exhibit could fuel antisemitism.

But her biggest concern, she said, is that “all the work that we put into this is going to be for naught, if people don’t trust this museum anymore.”

The exhibit “to me, brings the curatorship into disrepute,” Asper said.

“If it’s so small that you can’t include the truth, then you need to either not do it or you need to expand it. That’s a museum decision to make it so small — the museum’s got lots of room. I think they have room for the truth.”

Asper — who took over the campaign to bring the human rights museum into existence after the 2003 death of her father, philanthropist and CanWest Global Communications founder Israel Asper — said the fallout from the Nakba exhibit has felt both surreal and embarrassing.

Her family’s foundation donated over $23 million toward the museum’s construction, while she personally gave another $1.4 million. That’s in addition to more recent contributions to the museum’s fundraising efforts and exhibit development, Asper said in an email following her interview.

While the Asper Foundation stopped funding the museum’s annual gala after 2023 “because of concerns about its programming,” it was about to make a $50,000 donation to support a Holocaust exhibit, but has now paused that donation, she said.

Museum stands behind curation

Asper said she hopes to see an immediate review of the exhibit and the museum’s policies on how it decides what to present. But she still encourages people to see the Nakba collection themselves — and look at it with a “critical eye.”

And though she hopes to see changes made at the museum, in the meantime, the financial support her family would normally give will likely go toward a recent request to increase security measures at spaces like places of worship and schools in the Jewish community, she said.

“I just know that this is a disappointment for an organization that’s supposed to bring people together,” she said in her interview. “I’m always hopeful that things can be remedied, and with dialogue and understanding, we can get back on track.”

Museum spokesperson Amanda Gaudes said the small Nakba exhibit focuses on “the impact forced displacement continues to have on the Palestinian community here in Canada, and their ongoing struggle for human rights.”

In an emailed statement, Gaudes said the museum decided on that focus because Palestinian Canadian stories were underrepresented in its galleries, and “they are important to understand the landscape of human rights today.”

Building an understanding of those stories and experiences “is squarely within our mandate,” and focusing on them in one exhibit “does not detract or minimize experiences of Jewish people who were displaced and who have also faced human rights violations, which our galleries also share stories about,” Gaudes’s statement said.

The statement said telling stories of one community “in no way negates the experiences of another,” and the museum stands behind its curatorial process “and our reputation as a trusted source of human rights information.”

WATCH | Exhibit exploring displacement of Palestinians opens at human rights museum:

Human rights museum exhibit explores displacement of Palestinians

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights has unveiled a controversial exhibit on the Nakba, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.