The Zionist meltdown over the Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present exhibit offers a remarkable window into their anti-Palestinian racism. They don’t consider Palestinians important enough to even have their voices heard.
In the second email to their list on the matter in days, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs messaged its supporters Thursday: “This weekend, the publicly funded Canadian Museum for Human Rights will open an extremely controversial ‘Nakba’ exhibit that risks fanning the flames of Jew hatred. That’s right: a museum founded by the vision and generosity of Jewish community leaders is now being weaponized against us to serve a dangerous, one-sided political agenda…. The situation has been so grossly mishandled that just yesterday the museum’s only Jewish board member, Mark Berlin, felt compelled to resign.
“Prime Minister Carney recently acknowledged that Canada is failing Jewish Canadians and warned against importing overseas conflicts into Canadian society. Yet your taxpayer dollars are now supporting an exhibit at a national museum that does exactly that — at a time when our community faces unprecedented threats, including acts of terror.
“The Minister of Canadian Heritage must ensure accountability. Join us in urging the government to hold the museum’s CEO Isha Khan and its leadership accountable for this failure of governance, transparency, and public trust.”
Alongside CIJA calling on people to email the minister to demand he reprimand or fire the museum’s CEO, Irwin Cotler, Mark Berlin and Alan H. Kessel published a column in Thursday’s Globe and Mail headlined “The Canadian Museum for Human Rights has failed its mandate”.
In recent days the Globe has also published two negative stories about Palestine Uprooted based on wealthy activist Gail Asper criticizing the exhibit and museum board member Mark Berlin resigning over the matter. There have also been articles focused on the Zionist panic over the exhibit in the National Post, Winnipeg Free Press, Canadian Jewish News, Toronto Sun and others.
Amidst the genocidal Jewish supremacist meltdown about Palestine Uprooted, there’s been little discussion about a matter the exhibit likely downplays or ignores. While it has yet to open, Palestine Uprooted probably downplays the important role Canada played in the Palestinian catastrophe.
Hundreds of Canadian World War II veterans fought to ethnically cleanse Palestine. During the 1948 war Israel’s small air force was almost entirely foreign. At least 53 Canadians were part of it including Montreal’s Sydney Shulemson who is considered the “father of the Israeli Air Force”.
Additionally, Canadian capitalist Samuel Bronfman helped arm Zionist paramilitaries prior to Israel’s founding. In its 1971 obituary the New York Times reported that Samuel made “a secret purchase of Canadian weapons for troops of the Haganah.”
More substantially, Canadian diplomats made a sizeable contribution to the unjust UN Partition Plan, which called for the division of Palestine into ethnically segregated states and gave most of the land to the newly arrived minority. The partition plan legitimated the Zionists’ planned ethnic cleansing and, as Canadian diplomats warned privately in 1947, would lead to decades of conflict.
Under growing Zionist military pressure after the Second World War, Britain prepared to hand its mandate over Palestine to the newly created UN. In response, the U.S.-dominated international body formed the First Committee on Palestine, which was charged with developing the terms of reference for a committee that would find a solution for the British mandate.
Canada’s Undersecretary of External Affairs Lester Pearson, who had previously made his sympathy for Zionism clear, chaired the First Committee that established the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). At the First Committee, Pearson rejected Arab calls for an immediate end to the British mandate and the establishment of an independent democratic country. He also backed Washington’s push to admit a Jewish Agency representative to First Committee discussions (ultimately both a Jewish Agency and Palestinian representative were admitted).
Pearson tried to define UNSCOP largely to facilitate Zionist aspirations. The Arab Higher Committee wanted the issue of World War II European Jewish refugees excluded from UNSCOP but the Canadian diplomat worked to give the body a mandate “to investigate all questions and issues relevant to the problem of Palestine.”
A U.S. State Department memo noted that Pearson “proved to be an outstanding chairman for [the First] Committee.” The Canadian Arab Friendship League, on the other hand, complained that the First Committee plan for UNSCOP was “practically irresponsible and an invitation to…acts of terror on the part of Zionism.”
Canada’s delegate on the UNSCOP mission to Palestine pushed for the largest possible Zionist state and is considered the lead author of the majority report in support of partitioning Palestine into ethnically segregated states. Supreme Court justice Ivan C. Rand opposed proposals for a Jewish-Arab unitary state and made key interventions in the decision-making process in support of partition. “Rand worked hard,” notes his biographer, “to ensure the maximum geographical area possible for the new Jewish state.” At one point, Rand and another UNSCOP member, supported giving the Zionists a larger piece of land than they officially asked for.
At the end of their mission, the UNSCOP majority and minority reports were sent to the special UN Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question. At the Ad Hoc Committee Pearson rejected the Arab countries push to have the International Court of Justice decide whether the UN was allowed to partition Palestine. (Under U.S. pressure, the Ad Hoc Committee voted 21 to 20 — with 16 abstentions – against allowing the International Court to adjudicate the matter.)
The Ad Hoc Committee was split into two subcommittees with one focusing on the partition plan and the other on a bi-national state. At the Ad Hoc Committee’s Special Committee 1, Pearson worked feverishly to broker a partition agreement acceptable to Washington and Moscow. Preoccupied with the great powers, the indigenous inhabitants’ concerns did not trouble Pearson. He dismissed solutions that didn’t involve partition, which effectively meant supporting a Jewish state on Palestinian land.
Pearson played a central role in Special Committee 1’s partition plan. Both the New York Times and Manchester Guardianran articles about his role in the final stage of negotiations.
By supporting partition Canada opposed the indigenous population’s moral and political claims to sovereignty over their territory. Down from 90 per cent at the start of the British mandate, by the end of 1947 Arabs still made up two-thirds of Palestine’s population. Despite making up only a third of the population, under the UN partition plan Jews received most of the territory. Canada pushed a plan that gave the Zionist state 55 per cent of Palestine despite the Jewish population owning less than seven per cent of the land.
Privately Canadian Justice Minister J.L. Isley said he was “gravely concerned” the push for partition did not meet the Arabs “very strong moral and political claims.” The only Middle East expert at External Affairs, Elizabeth MacCallum, claimed Ottawa supported partition “because we didn’t give two hoots for democracy.” At the time of the partition vote, notes The Rise and Fall of a Middle Power, “MacCallum scribbled a note and passed it to Mike (Pearson) saying the Middle East was now in for ‘40 years’ of war, due to the lack of consultation with the Arab countries.” She was prescient, even if she underestimated the duration of the conflict.
A huge boost to the Zionist movements’ desire for an ethnically based state, the UN partition of British Mandate Palestine contributed to the displacement of at least 700,000 Palestinians. Scholar Walid Khalidi complained that UN (partition) Resolution 181 was “a hasty act of granting half of Palestine to an ideological movement that declared openly already in the 1930s its wish to de-Arabize Palestine.”
Perhaps the next exhibit after Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present should include a discussion of Canada’s important role in the Palestinian catastrophe.
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