Anti-Palestinian racism in Canada: The Nakba exhibit as a national test of truth and power

The Nakba exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights is far more than a cultural installation, it is a direct test of Canada’s willingness to uphold universal human rights, justice, and equality.

By Fareed Khan
A version of this article can be found on Substack

The opening of Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) on June 27, 2026 marked a watershed moment in Canadian public memory. For Palestinian Canadians—many of whom contributed family artifacts, testimonies, and archival materials—the exhibit represented something long denied to them—recognition that their history of ethnic cleansing is part of Canada’s human rights story, not a political controversy to be managed. Yet the ferocious backlash from Zionist Jewish organizations and the political pressure exerted on federal officials revealed a deeper truth—that anti‑Palestinian racism is very deeply embedded in Canadian institutions, shaping whose suffering is acknowledged and made public and whose is erased.

The controversy surrounding the exhibit did not emerge spontaneously. It exposed a long‑standing pattern in which Palestinian narratives are treated as dangerous, conditional, or illegitimate—while Zionist organizations assert a proprietary right to define how Palestinians and their history may be represented. The Nakba exhibit thus became more than a cultural installation. It became a test of whether Canada is willing to uphold truth, justice, and equality in the face of political interference and racialized suppression.

A campaign to silence Palestinian memory

Opposition to the exhibit began even before its doors opened. Several Zionist organizations—including the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada, the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg, and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA)— publicly attacked the exhibit, claiming it lacked “balance” and failed to include their perspectives. Heritage Minister Mark Miller even demanded that certain “omissions” and “errors” be “rectified.” His specific complaint was the absence of references to Hamas (an organization that didn’t exist until the early 1990s), echoing the talking points of those lobbying to undermine the exhibit. His intervention signaled a willingness to revisit the museum’s independence and to reframe Palestinian narratives through a Zionist lens.

The implications are unmistakable: Palestinians, whose lived experiences form the foundation of the exhibit, are not considered legitimate stakeholders in telling their own history. Instead, Zionist organizations asserted that they were the ones “directly impacted” by an exhibit documenting Palestinians’ history of dispossession, and pressured Miller to intervene.

CIJA escalated its objections, accusing the museum of “engaging extreme political activists” and failing to consult “communities directly impacted by its content.” This framing suggested that Palestinian testimony is inherently suspect unless validated by Zionist and Jewish voices—voices representing the very ideology responsible for the ethnic cleansing and massacre of Palestinians in 1947-48.

The hostility escalated further when Shurat HaDin, an Israel‑based legal organization, threatened legal action against the CMHR, claiming that the exhibit “erases Jewish history” and “delegitimizes Jewish self‑determination.” Such accusations rest on a deeper racialized logic: the presumption that Palestinian narratives are inherently destabilizing to Jewish identity. Beneath the surface, this framing implies that the very act of Palestinians recounting their history, indeed, their existence itself, is a provocation.

Asymmetry of memory: The Holocaust vs. Palestinian erasure

The material imbalance between Jewish and Palestinian narratives at the CMHR is stark. The Holocaust exhibit occupies more than 4,500 square feet, while the Nakba exhibit occupies less than three percent of that space. Canadian governments also funds three standalone Holocaust museums—in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver—each dedicated to ensuring that Nazi crimes are remembered, studied, and taught.

When those institutions were created, no one demanded that Nazis or Nazi sympathizers be consulted to provide “context or “balance” for those institutions. Yet in the case of the Nakba exhibit, Zionist and Jewish organizations insisted that their perspectives be built into the curatorial process. This asymmetry exposes a deeper truth in Canada—that Holocaust memory is treated as unquestionable moral ground, while Palestinian memory is treated as dangerous and conditional.

The is no argument that the Holocaust should be taught in schools, commemorated annually, and memorialized.  The massive amount of cultural and academic knowledge that has been produced since World War Two through museums, monuments, films, and an enormous body of academic research, makes it one of the most studied and memorialized events in modern history. But the contrast with Palestinian history is profound. The Nakba—during which more than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled and thousands massacred by Jewish terrorist militias and subsequently by the Israeli army in 1948—has received a very small fraction of the institutional attention devoted to the Holocaust. There are no publicly funded Nakba museums, no national commemorations, and no high school curricula dedicated to Palestinian history.

The CMHR exhibit is the first of its kind in a major Canadian institution. Its modest scale is in contrast to the enormous outrage it provoked within segments of the Canadian Jewish community, demonstrating that Palestinian suffering is not merely ignored or forgotten, it is actively suppressed.

A systemic pattern of anti‑Palestinian racism

The reaction to the Nakba exhibit aligns with findings from major studies on anti‑Palestinian racism in Canada. The Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA) April 2022 report defines anti‑Palestinian racism as systemic discrimination that includes:

• denying Palestinian existence, history, and identity;
• suppressing or punishing Palestinian narratives;
• portraying Palestinians as inherently violent or antisemitic;
• erasing the legitimacy of Palestinian suffering.

Research by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) similarly documents widespread patterns of media bias, political suppression, and institutional hostility toward Palestinian advocacy.

The backlash against the Nakba exhibit is a textbook example of these dynamics. Legacy Jewish organizations’ insistence that Palestinian narratives be “balanced” with Zionist perspectives—especially in a human rights museum—reflects a racialized hierarchy in which Palestinian testimony is treated as incomplete or dangerous unless validated by those who helped produce the conditions of Palestinian dispossession.

This is not neutral “context.” It is a demand that Palestinians be denied the right to narrate their own history.

Zionist Organizations and Supremacist Logic

Zionist organizations’ efforts to shut down, dilute, or reframe the Nakba exhibit reveal the depth of anti‑Palestinian racism embedded in their political advocacy. Their objections were never rooted in concerns about historical accuracy, and instead were driven by a determination to preserve a narrative in which Palestinians appear only as footnotes to a triumphant story of Jewish nation‑building in colonized Palestine.

Any attempt to centre Palestinian experiences of dispossession is treated as a threat—not because the facts are in dispute, but because acknowledging those facts destabilizes the ideological framework these organizations defend.

CIJA’s claim that the exhibit could “contribute to discrimination, bullying and even assault targeting Jewish students” is a striking example of how Palestinian narratives are stigmatized. The suggestion that acknowledging Palestinian suffering is inherently dangerous to Jews reflects a supremacist worldview in which Palestinians are seen not as victims of human rights violations but as inherent threats to the rights of others by their mere existence.

Similarly, Shurat HaDin’s assertion that the exhibit “delegitimizes Jewish self‑determination” reveals a belief that Palestinian history must be suppressed to protect Jewish identity. This is not political disagreement; it is supremacist logic.

Zionism, as practiced by these organizations, functions as a supremacist ideology—one that justifies the displacement, erasure, and dehumanization of Palestinians. The reaction to the Nakba exhibit demonstrates that these organizations are not defending historical accuracy but rather a political ideology that cannot tolerate the legitimacy of Palestinian narratives.

Institutional Power and Racialized Suppression

The resignation of Mark Berlin—the museum’s only Jewish trustee—became a flashpoint. Berlin accused the CMHR of “institutional anti‑Zionism” and denounced the exhibit as “curation by omission.” His departure illustrated how deeply Zionist ideology is expected to be accommodated in Canadian institutions, and where any attempt to tell stories about Palestinian suffering is swiftly recast as anti‑Jewish, biased, or dangerous.

This reflexive reframing does not arise from evidence. It arises from a political project that treats Palestinian memory as inherently dangerous to Jews and Palestinian voices as needing correction, containment, or counter‑narration.

Canada’s Human Rights Test

The Nakba exhibit is Canada’s human rights test. It asks whether Palestinians can exist in Canadian public memory without being filtered through Zionist ideology. It asks whether Palestinian suffering can be acknowledged without apology, without demands for “context” from those hostile to Palestinian existence, and without political interference.

Canada’s approach to historical memory makes the imbalance unmistakable. The country has invested enormous resources in memorializing the Holocaust but almost none in acknowledging the Zionist Jewish violence and atrocities that accompanied the creation of Israel through Palestinian dispossession. The CMHR exhibit is the first major attempt to acknowledge this history—and even that modest effort has been met with outrage, lobbying, and demands for ideological correction.

This opposition the CMHR display is purely political. The fury directed at the museum for daring to tell Palestinian stories demonstrates that the erasure of Palestinians is not a passive omission but an active project in Canada—one sustained by powerful Zionist organizations that insist Palestinian suffering must be  filtered through their ideological lens.

If Canada is ever to claim a genuine commitment to human rights, it must confront this reality directly. It must reject supremacist ideologies that seek to silence or reshape Palestinian narratives. And it must affirm, unequivocally, the right of Palestinians to narrate their own history—without permission from those who helped produce their dispossession.

Only then can Canada begin to live up to the principles it claims to uphold. 

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

“Anti Palestinianism” – A systemic racism equal in gravity to antisemitism (or maybe worse)

Anti‑Palestinianism is a system that devalues Palestinian life, suppresses Palestinian history, criminalizes Palestinian resistance, and punishes those who support Palestinian rights and refuse to look away.

By Fareed Khan
A version of this article can be found on Substack.

You’ve probably never heard the expression “anti‑Palestinianism.”  It is a term that has become synonymous with the more commonly used term “anti-Palestinian racism” or its acronym “APR.”  Anti-Palestinianism is defined as the systematic erasure, silencing, defamation, and punishment of Palestinians and those who stand with them, and it has become one of the most pervasive and least acknowledged forms of racism and hate in the Western world. It is not merely a matter of interpersonal prejudice, but rather a structural system that operates across governments, news media, universities, policing, and public discourse.

In Canada, the most detailed data available about this racism shows a dramatic escalation of APR or anti-Palestinianism since October 7, 2023. A national report documented a 600% increase of this type of hate in the eight months following October 2023, far above the 506 incidents recorded in 2022. These incidents include defamation, harassment, employment retaliation, censorship, and political vilification. The overwhelming majority—77%—involved defamatory slander portraying Palestinians or their supporters as “terrorist sympathizers” or inherently antisemitic. This was in addition to a reported 1800% increase in incidents of Islamophobia in the year following October 7th, as reported by the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM).

These are not accidental spikes. They are the visible surface of a deeper structure that mirrors, in its logic and effects, the long history of antisemitism in Europe and Western nations.

The Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA) defines anti‑Palestinian racism as a form of racism that silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames, or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives, including by denying the Nakba (ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine), justifying violence against Palestinians, erasing their human rights, and defaming them and their allies as inherently antisemitic or terrorist. This definition is not abstract. It is borne out in the way governments, police, universities, corporations, and news media in Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia have responded to Palestinian life, Palestinian grief, and resistance to Israeli oppression and occupation —not just since October 2023, but for almost eight decades since indigenous Palestinians were pushed off their land in historic Palestine.

The parallels between antisemitism and anti‑Palestinianism become unmistakable when we examine how each system constructs a racialized “other.” Antisemitism historically cast Jews as conspiratorial, disloyal, and inherently dangerous, and anti‑Palestinianism reproduces this same logic today by depicting Palestinians as violent, irrational, or terroristic regardless of their actual actions or political views. This pattern is starkly reflected in the 2023 Anti‑Palestinian Racism report by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME), which found that 585 documented incidents—nearly 60 percent of the total—involved slander portraying Palestinians as “terrorist sympathizers,” a trope relentlessly circulated in Canadian media and political discourse. Right‑wing news outlets in Canada, the United States, and Europe amplified this narrative by branding peaceful, multifaith, pro‑ceasefire demonstrations as “pro‑Hamas rallies” or “terrorist‑supporting mobs,” even when the protests were explicitly framed around human rights and opposition to genocide. In doing so, these media ecosystems played a central role in dehumanizing Palestinians and their supporters, recasting anti‑genocide campaigns as threats to national security and democratic stability rather than legitimate expressions of conscience.

This racialization is not confined to Canada. Analyses of anti‑Palestinian racism in the US shows how Palestinians and their supporters are routinely framed as extremists or potential terrorists in American media and political rhetoric, especially when they criticize Israeli policy or use language of decolonization. In Europe, similar patterns appear when governments and media describe large pro‑Palestinian marches in London, Paris, or Berlin as “hate marches” or “pro‑terror” gatherings, despite the overwhelmingly peaceful character of these demonstrations. The effect is to mark Palestinian identity and solidarity as inherently suspect, just as antisemitic discourse once marked Jewish identity as inherently dangerous.

Suppression of Palestinian identity and history is another core feature of anti‑Palestinianism. It amplifies anti‑Palestinian bias and prejudice by denying the Nakba, erasing Palestinian indigeneity, and suppressing acknowledgment of decades of occupation, ethnic cleansing, brutalization, and Israeli state violence. The ACLA description, summarized in multiple Canadian and international reports, explicitly identifies “denying the Nakba and justifying violence against Palestinians” and “failing to acknowledge Palestinians as an Indigenous people with a collective identity, belonging and rights in relation to occupied and historic Palestine” as core manifestations of APR. In Canadian public discourse, 1948 is still overwhelmingly narrated as the year Israel came into being, with little or no acknowledgment of the mass expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians, and the erasure of more than 500 Palestinian towns and villages, bulldozed or having forests planted where they once existed. This erasure extends into education and media. School curricula often omit the Nakba entirely, and mainstream media coverage of Gaza and the West Bank frequently strips events of historical context, presenting Israeli violence as isolated “responses” rather than part of a long continuum of occupation and settlement.

Criminalization of Palestinian political expression is another defining feature of anti‑Palestinianism. A national study of protest policing in Canada between 2021 and 2025 found that pro‑Palestinian protests accounted for only 10.1 percent of all demonstrations, yet they made up 37 percent of all police interventions. The CJPME study found that in 2024, nearly two‑thirds of all protest policing in Canada targeted pro‑Palestinian activity, despite the fact that more than 96% of these events were entirely peaceful. The report describes a coordinated architecture involving federal intelligence bodies and local police, treating a human‑rights movement as a security threat and using surveillance, bail conditions, intimidation and legal overreach to suppress speech. In several Canadian cities, police deployed riot squads and made mass arrests at peaceful sit‑ins and marches calling for a ceasefire, and imposed restrictive bail conditions that barred activists from attending future protests or using social media to express pro‑Palestinian views.

Across the Atlantic, European governments have gone even further. France issued blanket bans on pro‑Palestinian demonstrations, with the Interior Minister ordering police to disperse any such gatherings and arrest organizers. Germany banned or severely restricted many pro‑Palestinian protests in Berlin and other cities, often on the grounds of preventing “antisemitic incitement,” and has moved to outlaw organizations such as Samidoun—a Palestinian prisoner support network—under counter‑extremism laws. In the United Kingdom, senior officials described large pro‑Palestinian marches in London as “hate marches,” and then–Home Secretary Suella Braverman publicly labeled the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” a “hate slogan,” encouraging police to treat its use as potential criminality. In the United States, campus encampments and city‑center protests have been met with aggressive policing. At Columbia University and other campuses in spring 2024, police in riot gear dismantled pro‑Palestinian encampments, arresting hundreds of students and faculty on charges such as trespassing and disorderly conduct, even when the protests were nonviolent.

Punishment of allies is another hallmark of anti‑Palestinianism. Antisemitism historically targeted non‑Jews who stood with Jewish communities against persecution. Anti‑Palestinianism similarly punishes Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and secular supporters of Palestinian rights, branding them “antisemitic,” “extremist,” or terrorist‑adjacent for advocating equality. The “Palestine exception” documented by the Islamophobia Research Hub at York University shows how institutions that celebrate diversity and human rights routinely suspend those commitments when Palestine is involved, targeting not only Palestinians but also their allies. In Canada, the Palestine Exception report and related surveys document numerous cases in which students, academics, and professionals faced retaliation for supporting Palestinian rights. Jewish and non‑Jewish signatories to ceasefire letters have been subjected to internal investigations, contract cancellations, and public smearing. Some university instructors have even had their courses scrutinized or their professional appointments delayed after they spoke out against Israeli apartheid or about the Nakba, while student groups have faced official derecognition or funding cuts for organizing Palestine solidarity events.

This pattern is visible across the Western world. In the United States, high‑profile “doxxing trucks” have driven around elite campuses displaying the names and photos of students—many of them Jewish—who signed statements supporting Palestinian rights, labelling them “antisemites” or “terrorist supporters” and inviting employers to blacklist them. Journalists have been fired or pushed out of newsrooms for using terms like “Palestine,” “occupation,” or “genocide” in their reporting or social media posts. Clergy and lay leaders in European Christian churches who have spoken out for Palestinian rights have been denounced as antisemitic and, in some cases, removed from positions or had their events cancelled. These are not random overreactions; they are the enforcement mechanisms of anti‑Palestinianism as a system that seeks to isolate Palestinians by making solidarity socially and professionally dangerous.

Anti‑Palestinianism is also inseparable from the material system of domination under which Palestinians live. In the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, Palestinians endure military occupation, siege, settlement expansion, home demolitions, and mass incarceration. Repeated large‑scale assaults on Gaza—in 2008–09, 2012, 2014, and the ongoing Gaza genocide since 2023—have killed tens of thousands of civilians, including children, journalists, medics, and elders, with two independent studies estimating the cumulative death toll at 377,000 and more than 680,000. Yet anti‑Palestinian discourse routinely inverts this reality, portraying Palestinians as the primary source of violence while erasing or rationalizing the structural violence imposed on them by Israel. As the systemic APR study notes, justifying violence against Palestinians and denying them equal dignity and worth are defining features of anti‑Palestinianism. In Canadian media and politics, this manifests in the reflexive framing of Israeli military actions as “self‑defence,” while Palestinian resistance—whether armed, unarmed, or purely symbolic—is cast as terrorism. This dynamic is reinforced by the stark imbalance in political and media access, where pro‑Palestinian advocates are granted far less face time with elected officials and far less airtime or column space in mainstream news than pro‑Israel or Zionist voices, further entrenching a narrative that marginalizes Palestinian humanity and perspectives.

These dynamics become even more stark when viewed through the lens of the Mark Carney government’s posture toward the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza. Even as international courts, UN agencies, genocide and Holocaust scholars, and prominent human rights organizations have declared that genocidal crimes are taking place as defined under the Genocide Convention, the Carney government has refused to use the word at all, choosing instead a vocabulary of euphemisms—“crisis,” “conflict,” “tragedy”—that obscures the deliberate, systematic destruction of an entire people. This refusal is not semantic, it is political. To name genocide would be to acknowledge legal obligations under the Genocide Convention, including the duty to prevent, the duty to punish, and the duty to cease all forms of complicity. By declining to name the crime, the Carney shields himself and his government from these obligations and reinforces the broader architecture of anti‑Palestinianism that treats Palestinian life as less grievable, less visible, and less worthy of protection.

The Canadian government’s decision to continue authorizing weapons exports to Israel even as the official death toll in Gaza approached 80,000, even as entire neighborhoods were flattened, even as UN experts warned of famine engineered through the deliberate obstruction of humanitarian aid, reflects the same logic. The government’s insistence that these exports were “non‑lethal” or “not directly linked” to the assault mirrors the logic of anti‑Palestinianism—a logic that minimizes Palestinian suffering, abstracts Palestinian death into technicalities, and treats Palestinian bodies as collateral rather than as human beings entitled to the full protection of international law. The government’s refusal to sanction Israeli political and military leaders—despite their explicit calls for the destruction of Gaza, despite their public statements advocating the genocide of Palestinians, despite their command responsibility for mass killing—reveals a deeper moral failure. When Israeli leaders openly invoke the biblical language of extermination, when they describe Palestinians as “human animals,” when they call for Gaza to be destroyed or completely “erased,” these are not ambiguous statements. They are incitement to genocide. Yet the Canadian government has declined to impose sanctions, declined to restrict diplomatic engagement, and declined to hold any Israeli official accountable.

When antisemitism and anti‑Palestinianism are placed side by side, the parallels between them come sharply into focus. Both operate by constructing an entire people as inherently dangerous or undeserving of rights, and both depend on erasing or denying the group’s history, trauma, and claims to justice. Each system suppresses political expression, punishes those who stand in solidarity, and provides ideological cover for state violence. However, one difference is that Western societies have come to terms with their historic treatment of Jews and made amends, while anti-Palestinianism is embedded within institutions that profess universal human‑rights commitments while simultaneously carving out exceptions when the victims are Palestinians. It is within this broader architecture that the Carney government’s refusal to recognize the genocide in Gaza, its continued authorization of weapons exports to Israel, and its unwillingness to sanction Israeli leaders must be understood. These are not isolated policy missteps or bureaucratic oversights; they are manifestations of a deeper, systemic prejudice that devalues Palestinian life and shields those responsible for Palestinian suffering from accountability.

Recognizing anti‑Palestinianism as a form of racism equal in gravity to antisemitism does not diminish the specificity of Jewish historical trauma, nor does it collapse distinct experiences into a single narrative. Instead, it insists that the tools we have developed to understand and combat antisemitism—attention to dehumanizing stereotypes, to structural exclusion, to the criminalization of identity, and to the role of state power—must also be applied to the treatment of Palestinians and those who stand with them. The CJPME reports and the ACLA study make clear that anti‑Palestinian racism is systemic in Canada, operating across media, politics, education, and law. Analyses from scholars and journalists show that similar dynamics are at work in the United States and Europe, where Palestinians and their supporters face erasure, defamation, repression and persecution.

If antisemitism is rightly understood as a profound moral and political danger that corrodes democratic life and paves the way for atrocity, then anti‑Palestinianism must be understood in the same register. It is a system that devalues Palestinian life, suppresses Palestinian history, criminalizes Palestinian resistance, and punishes those who refuse to look away. It is also a system that enables governments like Carney’s to continue supplying weapons to a state accused of genocide, to refuse to name the crime unfolding before the world, and to ignore the deliberate starvation of an entire population through the blocking of humanitarian aid. To confront anti‑Palestinianism is not to undermine the struggle against antisemitism; it is to extend the same ethical standard to another people whose humanity has been systematically denied. It is to insist that the universal principles invoked in defense of Jewish life must also be invoked in defense of Palestinian life. And it is to recognize that a government that refuses to name genocide, refuses to halt its material support for it, and refuses to hold its perpetrators accountable is not neutral—it is complicit.

© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.