Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to today's episode of Red Eye. I'm Jane Williams. Over the summer, mo we're bringing you some of the highlights of our 2025-26 season, which wrapped up in mid-May.
Speaker: We're going to be back with our brand new fall season in September. Our first live radio broadcast will be on September 19th on Vancouver Cooperative Radio CFRO 100.5 FM and streaming live at coopradio.org slash red eye.
Speaker: Podcasts of interviews from that show will be posted the following week. Coming up in this episode, I speak with Jonah Korn of the University of Manitoba about the Canadian Museum of Human Rights upcoming exhibit, Palestine Uprooted, Nachbar, Past and Present.
Speaker: The Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg is the only national museum to be located outside the national capital region. The museum was the brainchild of the late Israel, Asper, founder of the media company CanWest Global, and it was originally intended to be a Holocaust museum.
Speaker: The present-day museum claims to champion the stories of global injustice, yet in the more than 10 years since it opened, it has not meaningfully acknowledged the massive dispossession of Palestinians that took place in 1948 with the founding of the State of Israel.
Speaker: Last month, in a significant reversal, the CMHR announced an exhibit titled Palestine Uprooted, Nachbar Past and Present, slated to open to visitors in June next year.
Speaker: Jonah Korn is an associate professor in the Department of English Theatre, Film and Media at the University of Manitoba. And he joins me this morning from Winnipeg. Hello, Jonah. Hello.
Speaker: Hello. So how long has the Palestinian Canadian community been pushing for the museum to include the stories of survivors of the Nakba?
Speaker: for a very, very long time. In fact, this push goes back to even before the museum opened, which was in 2014. Before it opened, the museum had put out a call for suggestions for content, and a Palestinian-Canadian here in Winnipeg, Rana Abdullah, had replied to this and basically did not receive a response immediately, and then later only a kind of lukewarm and sort of delayed response, but nothing materialized out of that. So this push for Anakpa exhibition acknowledgement at the museum has been going on for longer than a decade, for longer than the museum has existed.
Speaker: Now, the museum was also criticized by indigenous people. What were some of the reasons for that? Well, the reasons for that also started before the museum even opened its doors.
Speaker: When construction, the excavation began for the museum, archaeologists had criticized the museum for failing allot sufficient funds to excavate and properly go through and care for the archaeological heritage on the site.
Speaker: The site of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights is very, very important. it's at the Forks in Winnipeg, which is this extremely important Indigenous site where the Assiniboine and the Red Rivers meet. And so it's a very, very rich archaeological site and really not enough funds were invested in caring for the site and it's for its deep history.
Speaker: And I understand there was also some resistance on the part of the museum until quite a few years ago, resisting describing the experience of Indigenous people in Canada in terms of genocide. Yes, that's right. So this was another major failing of the museum, which was this resistance to describe the experience of Indigenous people in Canada in terms of genocide. And that was actually reversed in 2019.
Speaker: two thousand and nineteen And so there were a lot of these issues, I think, early on. I think we also have to remember when the museum opened, this was the Stephen Harper prime ministership of Canada. And so it was very, very fraught and has continued to be.
Speaker: And I think one of the things that maybe people are not aware of is that that is a national museum. It's a crown corporation. It's funded by the government. Yes, exactly. So it's the only federal museum located outside of Ottawa. And so it has the imprimatur of Canada, of the nation. It's not just some very small, private, or even provincial museum. It stands for something much larger in relation to to Canada.
Speaker: The federal government appointed a new CEO, Isha Khan, in 2020. Now, she's a prominent Canadian human rights lawyer. And I'm wondering what you think led to the decision to mount this exhibit now.
Speaker: The truth is I don't know exactly what happened behind the scenes to finally green light this exhibition. Obviously, since October 7th, there's been a huge presence of Palestine in the world consciousness. A genocide is being committed in Gaza.
Speaker: And so these issues are very much on people's minds. But I think what is important to point out is that the exhibition is not necessarily just a response to what has happened in Palestine since October 7th, but this push has well preceded that.
Speaker: So it's not as if everything began on October 7th, or this is purely some kind of response to that. It goes back much further. We don't know much about the proposed exhibit, but we do know the title. Yes. Which is Palestine Uprooted, Nachbar Past and Present.
Speaker: What do you make of that title? Well, I think that the most important thing about it is that the word Nakba is included in the title. This is a word that in pro-Israel discourse is reviled and impugned, and just to have that word there, I think, is very, very important.
Speaker: and uprooted, i think, is not inaccurate. There are other terms that I think once you are introduced to the term Nakba, there's a cluster of terms that sort of circulate around it, like ethnic cleansing, dispossession, settler colonialism, occupation, genocide.
Speaker: So I think with all things Israel and Palestine, naming is always deeply, deeply fraught. But I think that The important thing here is that we have the word Nakba in the title.
Speaker: I know you were at the announcement of the new exhibit. Do we know what it's going to consist of? We know very, very little. i was at the announcement and it was a very important announcement, but it was just kind of smuggled in, I think, strategically amongst a number of other announcements.
Speaker: And what we know is that it'll consist of oral histories, you know, testimonies from survivors and then maybe their descendants. It'll include art. It'll include some artifacts. I understand that there'll be a digital component for those people who can't actually make it to the physical museum.
Speaker: But that's pretty much all we know. There's a little bit about it up on the CMHR's website, you know, an image, a few sentences, maybe a little reading list, but not really much, which I think we'll get into the responses to this. But I think the important thing to remember is that what people are reacting to right now is something that that hasn't even been realized in the world. It's just been announced. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, you mentioned the responses and some Jewish organizations have condemned the museum's announcement. Why do you think it's contentious to state that three quarters of a million Palestinians were dispossessed in 1948? Yeah, it's true. Several Jewish organizations, pro-Israel Jewish organizations have condemned the announcement like Sija, Jewish Heritage Center of Western Canada,
Speaker: But the short answer is that no nation likes to acknowledge the negative, violent things in its past.
Speaker: And it's just a matter of historical fact that the State of Israel entail the massive dispossession of Palestinians. And for Israel, they don't want to acknowledge this, recognize this, or if there's some kind of partial reckoning with it, it's minimized in a manner that amounts to a kind of denial, but it tarnishes their image.
Speaker: And it problematizes their sense of themselves and all of that. And we can draw parallels to different other situations.
Speaker: Why was it that for so long in Canada, and still in an ongoing way, we've had difficulties reckoning with indigenous genocide and residential schools and and all of these other...
Speaker: very violent and savory things in our past with which the foundation of the nation is wrapped up. Some of the groups protesting the upcoming exhibit say that any exhibit about the Nahwa must be counterbalanced by the story of Jewish displacement from Middle Eastern and North African countries in the wake of 1948. Is that a fair comment in your view?
Speaker: Absolutely not. I think that this is one of the tactics that these pro-Israel organizations use to try to minimize the Nakba, which again is a form of denial.
Speaker: The idea here that they're expressing is that the exhibition, without having even seen it, is that it'll be invalidatingly imbalanced because it won't say anything about the displacement of Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews that arose in the wake of 1948.
Speaker: This is a story that maybe not a lot of people know, but in the wake of 1948, there were these mass migrations, exoduses, no matter how you want to call them, from Middle Eastern countries, which had Jewish populations going back a long time, hundreds of years or longer.
Speaker: And for various reasons, one, the governments may have turned on the populations. Israel made many concerted efforts to try and draw away those inhabitants to Israel. It's a very complicated situation. But the reality is is that this has nothing to do with Palestinians' own experience of dispossession.
Speaker: with the Nakba. And moreover, it wasn't Palestinians who caused the dispossession of Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews to Israel.
Speaker: It wasn't Palestinians who were running Iraq or Yemen or Syria or Lebanon or any of these countries. So it's just, for me, a non-starter and a tactic of deflection and essentially Nakba denial.
Speaker: The CMHR has an extensive and permanent Holocaust gallery. How do you think the proposed Nakba exhibit could usefully inform that permanent gallery?
Speaker: Yeah, I think that that it can inform it in a responsible and effective way. There's one very, very strong narrative that circulates within pro-Israel discourse that sees the Holocaust as a kind of ultimate justification for the founding of the Jewish state. And obviously, you know many Holocaust survivors came to Israel during the 1930s when there were very extreme immigration restrictions on Jewish people who couldn't get into Western countries, including Canada. Many went to mandatory Palestine.
Speaker: So the Holocaust is deeply bound up with Israel and the founding of the State of Israel, But what I think is problematic is when this sort of redemptive narrative of the Holocaust is taken so far that it can't encompass the historical reality of what the founding of the Israeli state entailed, which is something that actually went much farther back than context of Nazism and the Holocaust. And so for me, this mantra of Holocaust education, never again, for me as a Jewish person who learned about this, really my whole life, going to Jewish school and all of these things,
Speaker: For me, the main value of it was never to see it in a kind of exclusivist way, but to see how it would inform the present, other situations, and all of these other things. And so for me, there's absolutely no contradiction in commemorating the Holocaust and learning from the Holocaust and also using that education to understand eliminationist logic of that underwrote the settler colonial project in Palestine. So I think that you know a hypothetical museum-goer might actually productively pass from one exhibition to the other in a way that could actually enrich both.
Speaker: And the reality is that the Holocaust and the Nakba have for too long been treated as like almost mutually exclusive. But I don't think that that is far from the only way to look at them. In fact, they can be looked at in productive conjunction.
Speaker: Well, thank you so much for speaking with me today, Jonah. You're welcome. I've been speaking with Jonah Korn. He's an associate professor in the Department of English, Theater, Film and Media at the University of Manitoba. And you can find his recent article on the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and the Nachbar exhibit at theconversation.com.
Speaker: You've been listening to the Red Eye Podcast, produced by an independent media collective based in Vancouver. If you enjoyed this episode, it would be great if you left a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps other people to find us.
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Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. Thanks for listening.
