This is an edited and abridged version of a speech delivered by the author at the Rose and Max Rady Jewish Community Centre in Winnipeg, Canada, on 3 September 2026.

I am here this evening at the invitation of the Network of Engaged Canadian Academics (NECA) to speak about “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present,” an exhibition that has recently opened at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) here in Winnipeg. As my work as a historian includes publication about the establishment of the state of Israel and the war of 1948, NECA asked me to assess whether or not the exhibition meets the standards of historical scholarship.

As the museum receives substantial annual funding from Canada’s federal government, Manitoba’s provincial government, and the city of Winnipeg, the quality of its presentation is a matter of public concern and of concern to the international discipline of history. I have visited the exhibition in person and viewed it online, and in my view it offers an inaccurate and incomplete account of the war of 1948 and its consequences. It presents a myth familiar from the propaganda promoted by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) since the 1960s. It does not meet the standards set by the large and excellent historical scholarship about these issues. 

On 13 November 1974, Yassir Arafat, chairman of the PLO, addressed the United Nations General Assembly. His speech was written by a Palestinian writer and PLO member named Mahmoud Darwish, and it elicited a firm reply from Israel’s UN ambassador Yosef Tekoah. “Palestine Uprooted” cites Darwish’s poetry and presents an identical version of the 1948 war to that presented by Arafat and Darwish 52 years ago. That speech presented the Palestine Arabs of 1948 as the innocent victims of Zionist perfidy. It was a justification for the resort to war and terror that was the PLO’s modus operandi when Arafat spoke. Arafat and Darwish erased the responsibility that Palestinian and Arab nationalists bore for the war of 1948 and its consequences. That denial is at the centre of the version of events now being presented at a government-supported museum for human rights in Canada.

Neither Arafat in 1974 nor the “Palestine Uprooted” exhibition today mention that the Arabs had rejected all suggestions of partition before they went to war in 1948. The first of these was proposed by the British Government’s Peel Commission in 1937. The Zionists accepted an offer of what would have been a state far smaller than the one that later emerged. The Palestine Arabs rejected the proposal and left no room for negotiation. They were led by Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. By the mid-1930s, his hatred of Judaism, Jews, and Zionism had attracted the attention of Nazi Germany’s consulate in Jerusalem. Between 1936 and 1939, he led an Arab revolt in Palestine against the Zionists and those Arabs who wanted to coexist with the Zionist project.

In 1937, Husseini fled Palestine after the British authorities tried to arrest him, and he elaborated his views in an important essay titled “Islam and Jewry” that was read in his absence to a pan-Arab nationalist conference in Bludan, Syria. The following year, a publisher in Berlin close to the Nazi regime published the text in German as Islam-Judentum. “Islam and Jewry” is a foundational text of Islamist ideology—a radical political interpretation of Islam that describes Jews as the enemies of Islam since the days of Mohammed. Husseini depicted the Zionist project as the latest episode in seven centuries of Jewish aggression against Islam and Muslims.

With arguments like these, Husseini and Hassan al-Banna, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, helped to transform a secular dispute over borders and territory into a religious campaign. This made opposition to any Jewish state in the land of British Mandate Palestine a religious obligation for all Muslims, in Palestine and everywhere else. The result, from the 1930s to the present, has been a long religious war to prevent and then to destroy the state of Israel.

Husseini spent 1941–5 in Berlin, where he and his entourage produced Arabic-language radio broadcasts that the Nazi regime sent via shortwave radio to audiences across the Middle East. Husseini occasionally spoke on these broadcasts in his own name and repeated—often word for word—the arguments he made in “Islam and Jewry.” He insisted that it was the religious obligation of all Muslims to oppose the establishment of any Jewish state in Palestine. He stated that the victory of Nazi Germany in World War II was in the interests of the Palestine Arabs because it would bring about the defeat of their enemies—the Allied Powers and the Jews.

The French arrested Husseini in May 1945 and held him under house arrest near Paris for a year. American leftists and liberals tried to have him indicted for war crimes before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. But French officials, aware that Husseini could support French post-colonial interests in Lebanon and Syria, refrained from sending him to trial and refused to deport him to Britain. In May 1946, he managed to escape to Cairo, where Hassan al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood gave him a hero’s welcome. Al-Banna noted that although Hitler and Himmler were dead, Husseini would “continue the struggle” against the Jews. The “Palestine Uprooted” exhibition says nothing about the ideological fusion of Nazism and Islamism during World War II or about the profoundly reactionary elements of Islamist Jew-hatred that were an important cause of the 1948 war.

Nor does “Palestine Uprooted” mention that, in November 1947, Canada joined the two-thirds majority in the United Nations General Assembly to vote in favour of a resolution supporting the establishment of two states—one Jewish, and one Arab—on part of what was British Mandate Palestine. Many of the international supporters of the Zionist project believed it to be a continuation of the anti-fascist cause in World War II. Still, the West’s democracies were not exactly emphatic supporters of establishing a state of Israel. Britain abstained from voting. And while US president Harry Truman strongly supported the Zionist project, his State Department did not. In the view of secretary of state George Marshall and policy planning staff director George Kennan, creating a Jewish state in British Mandate Palestine would undermine Western access to Arab oil and likely become a source of Soviet and communist expansion in the region. The notion that Israel was a Western colonialist or US imperialist endeavour is one of those influential myths that persist despite the massive evidence refuting it. 

No country did more to spread that myth than the Soviet Union in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. But this required Soviet diplomats and propagandists to suppress and deny their previous support for Israel between 1947 and 1949, when the Soviet Union, Ukrainian SSR, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia all offered indispensable political and—in the case of Czechoslovakia—military support. The Soviets’ UN representative, Andrei Gromyko, the Polish representative and former Auschwitz prisoner, Alfred Fiederkiewicz, and Vasyl Tarasenko, the Ukrainian representative, all emphatically supported the two-state resolution. In the spring and summer of 1948, Gromyko and Tarasenko supported Israeli UN ambassador Abba Eban and the Zionists’ leading foreign-policy spokesman (and future foreign minister) Moshe Sharett at the UN Security Council. It was communist Czechoslovakia, not Britain or the United States, that provided the Zionists with the heavy weaponry—planes, tanks, artillery, and armoured vehicles—that they desperately needed to defend their fledgeling state.

During those critical years, the United States dithered and even threatened to abandon the two-state solution at one point in order to appease Arab outrage. The United States and Britain also persuaded the UN to impose an arms embargo on the region that inflicted more damage on the not-yet-existing state of Israel than it did on the existing Arab states. At the time, the communists believed the state of Israel was an anti-colonial endeavour and a blow against what they called British imperialism. None of this history appears in “Palestine Uprooted.”

If the leadership of the Palestine Arabs had accepted the United Nations’ partition resolution in November 1947, there would have been no war of 1948 and the state of Palestine might be approaching its eightieth anniversary along with Israel. The history of the region would have been very different. But presented with the opportunity to form a state if they were willing to share Mandate Palestine with the Jews, the Arab Higher Committee refused. In November and December 1947, the AHC and its armed units began the war with attacks on the Jewish community in Palestine in an attempt to undermine the partition resolution. This was not just a war against the Jews or Zionists. Arab rejectionism was also widely understood as a snub to the authority of the newly established United Nations.

On 14 May 1948, the British completed their withdrawal from Palestine and Israel declared its independence. The next day, four Arab states—Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria—ordered their armies to invade and destroy the new state of Israel. Jordan followed soon after. The leaders of these countries could have rejected calls by the Muslim Brotherhood to wage war. But doing so risked the wrath of Islamist organisations and domestic unrest.

The version of this history on the “Palestine Uprooted” page of the museum’s website ignores these developments and refocusses attention on the refugees produced by a war of aggression that the Arabs had started:

In 1948, [Jewish] militias, followed by Israeli forces, expelled civilians, destroying or emptying hundreds of villages amid regional war and lasting instability. Around 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced during the creation of the state of Israel.

This is an extremely misleading account of the birth of the Palestinian refugee crisis. What Darwish and others called the Nakba (“catastrophe”) is inseparable from the war that the Palestine Arab leadership launched and that the Arab states then escalated. Israeli historian Benny Morris has concluded that the refugee problem was not the result of a Zionist plan or doctrine, it was a result of the war. When Arab forces managed to conquer villages, they expelled the Jews, a policy that Morris, in his book 1948, writes “stemmed quite naturally from the expulsionist mindset prevailing in the Arab states.” Israeli expulsions, when they occurred, tended to be motivated by strategic concerns not ideology.

Morris’s account of what happened in Lydda is just one example of how a careful historian has examined the tragic events of July 1948. Arab forces were attacking traffic on the main road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, near Lydda and the Arab town of Ramla. The Israel Defence Forces decided to clear all the remaining Arab-held sections of the Tel-Aviv–Jerusalem Road and the controlling ridge of hills to its north, partly to break a siege of the Jewish civilians in Jerusalem. The orders to General Yigal Allon on 26 June read: “To attack in order to destroy the enemy forces in the area of the bases of Lyda-Ramla-Latrun-Ramallah, to capture these bases and by so doing to free the city of Jerusalem and the road to it from enemy pressure.”

A short battle for control of Lydda ensued on 11 July between the IDF and the forces of the Arab Legion. On July 12, a squadron of the Arab Legion’s armoured cars surprised IDF forces who thought the town had been pacified. Locals joined the fighting, sniping from windows and rooftops. Morris writes:

The jittery Palmachniks [Israeli soldiers] responded by firing at anything that that moved, throwing grenades into houses and massacring detainees in a mosque compound; altogether “about 250” townspeople died and many were injured, according to IDF records. Ben Gurion then authorized Allon to expel the population of Lydda which had “rebelled” and Ramla. From the first, Ben-Gurion and the IDF commanders had thought of depopulating the two towns.

IDF units were ordered “to allow the speedy flight from Ramla of women, old people and children.” Morris estimates that at least 70,000 Palestine Arabs became refugees as a result of what came to be known as “The Ten Days” battles in July. But these battles had also solved a major strategic problem by ensuring safe passage on the road to Jerusalem and breaking the siege of the city. 

For the Palestine Arabs expelled from their homes, distinctions between expulsions motivated by strategic necessity and expulsions motivated by ideology did not mitigate the tragedy that befell them. But subsequent Palestinian nationalist and Islamist versions of these events have deliberately obscured this distinction in order to foment rage and resentment. This is evident in the “Palestine Uprooted” exhibition, which neglects to point out that expulsions took place in the context of military campaigns and a war begun and escalated by the Arabs themselves, who were pursuing explicitly expulsionist aims. 

In 1949, Israel’s foreign minister Moshe Sharett addressed the Palestinian refugee problem in a cabinet meeting: 

There are those who say that we uprooted the Arabs from their places. But even they will not deny that the source of the problem was the war: had there been no war, the Arabs would not have abandoned their villages, and we would not have expelled them. Had the Arabs from the start accepted the decision of 29 November [1947], a completely different Jewish state would have arisen. … In essence the State of Israel would have arisen with a large Arab minority, which would have left its impress on the state, on its manner of governance, and on its economic life, and [this Arab minority] would have constituted an organic part of the state.

Sharett was right about the cause of the Palestinian refugee problem, but he was too optimistic about the future willingness of Palestinian nationalist organisations and leaders like Arafat to acknowledge that “the source of the problem was the war.” As it is, about twenty percent of the population of the State of Israel has remained Arab and left its imprint on the government and economy of Israel.

“Palestine Uprooted” also ignores the fact that about 800,000 Jews were expelled from Muslim-majority societies across North Africa and the Middle East between 1948 and 1964. Almost all were uprooted from their homes, most resettled in Israel, and a small minority—the wealthier families—resettled in France and Britain. They were intimidated into flight by state oppression (in Egypt and Iraq in 1948–51), by intimidation from their Muslim neighbours (including pogroms during 1947–8 in Bahrain, British-ruled Yemen, French-ruled Morocco and Syria), and by terrorism (in Egypt and Iraq).

Hundreds of thousands of Sephardi Jewish refugees reached Israel during the 1950s, when the state was young and poor. Initially, they were often poorly absorbed—some lived in tent transit camps for years—and some suffered from social-ethnic discrimination at the hands of the existing Ashkenazi population. Many of the new immigrants were illiterate or poorly educated, and they remained unemployed for years or worked in menial jobs. Yet the Jews uprooted from the region did eventually become citizens of the state of Israel and ceased to be refugees. It turned out to be one of the most remarkable examples of the successful reception of refugees in modern history.

While Jewish refugees expelled from Arab states became Israeli citizens, Palestine Arabs in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, and Syria were denied citizenship by the host countries and left stateless. In Jordan and the West Bank, meanwhile, they became Jordanians but remained second-class citizens for decades. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was created in 1949 to address the Palestinian refugee crisis, and it adopted a unique policy towards Palestinian refugees that the UN has applied to no other refugees around the globe. Not only does it recognise their statelessness in countries that refuse to absorb them, but it also confers refugee status on the children and grandchildren of refugees, which ensures that the refugee population has grown steadily since 1948.

UNRWA in particular and the United Nations in general both bear significant responsibility for this absurdity. Today, Palestinian leaders continue to speak about a “right of return,” even though the vast majority of those who fled in 1947–8 are no longer alive. This has helped to foster the delusion that they can one day return to homes that no longer exist and many surviving refugees and their descendants retain the keys to the houses they lost. The absence of absorption, lack of citizenship, and mythology about the origins of their refugee status have made the Palestinian refugees a propaganda weapon against Israel, and their towns have become breeding grounds for anti-Israeli hatred and terrorism since they emerged in the late 1960s.

When the “Palestine Uprooted” exhibition refers to an “intergenerational trauma at the heart of personal stories and human rights issues,” it fails to acknowledge the disastrous nature of the political decisions made by generations of Palestinian and Arab leaders. It was the Arab rejection of the UN resolution, not the Zionist defence of the compromise, that was unjust and unwise. At its core, that rejection was a rejection of the values of diversity and tolerance that the Canadian Museum for Human Rights exists to support. The wars launched by Arab states, Palestinian nationalists, and Islamists ever since have been waged to advance religious and ethnic homogeneity. But remarkably, in recent decades, Islamists have largely escaped moral censure by waging wars in support of ideas that attack the very principles of human rights and liberalism.

The exhibition’s discussion of events in the decades after 1948 includes the same neglect of Palestinian agency and responsibility that mars its account of the war. In a section entitled “Under Occupation,” it deplores the separation wall, checkpoints, movement restrictions, home demolitions, and forced evictions, but it does not mention that these were all defensive measures taken in response to decades of terrorist attacks from Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza that claimed the lives of thousands of Israelis. By not mentioning the terror campaigns, the “Palestine Uprooted” exhibition suggests that security measures have been introduced for no other reason than to make the lives of Palestinians harder.

It is particularly unfortunate that the exhibition treats the Hamas Health Ministry as a reliable source of casualty figures during the most recent Gaza war. Hamas (as the Canadian government has agreed) is a terrorist organisation that seized power in Gaza in 2007, murdered its political opponents in the Palestinian Authority, and imposed a theocratic dictatorship. It indoctrinated young people in religious hatred, intimidated journalists, destroyed whatever remained of the free press, persecuted homosexuals, and promoted reactionary views about the place of women in society. Its rule has been a constant human-rights violation.

The exhibition mentions allegations of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity but it ascribes these crimes to Israel not to Hamas, and it fails to mention that the Hamas-led attack of 7 October was genocidal in intent and practice. While the Israeli military has done what it can to avoid civilian casualties as it fights Hamas, Hamas intentionally murdered, raped, and kidnapped Israeli civilians. Those unambiguous human-rights violations are left unmentioned by “Palestine Uprooted.”

An Interrupted Genocide

The widespread reluctance to describe the atrocities of 7 October correctly is an impediment to peace.

QuilletteJeffrey Herf

Ever since November 1974, when Yassir Arafat delivered his speech at the United Nations, the myths peddled in “Palestine Uprooted” have been used to justify a campaign of terrorism and war waged to destroy the state of Israel. The ability of Palestinian propagandists to capture and misuse the credibility of a government-affiliated institution in Winnipeg will fan the flames of antizionism and antisemitism in Canada. But it also constitutes an attack on the discipline of history and the effort of historians to present a truthful and complete account of the past. Historians in Canada should defend our profession, and government officials should ensure the prestige bestowed by state funding and support is not placed at the service of those who distort the past.