During the development of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, we spent months planning the Canadian Journeys gallery, the museum’s largest exhibition space. Its eighteen small niches each tell a different human rights story.

We debated which stories belonged there, which objects best illuminated them, whose voices should be heard and how much historical context each required. Every decision meant setting something else aside — not because it was unimportant, but because no museum exhibition can tell everything.

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That experience came back to me during the controversy surrounding Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present. Much of the criticism has focused on what the exhibition leaves out. Some critics have argued that because it omits important aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it presents a false picture. Some have called it “untrue.”

That is a serious accusation. But it raises a larger question: What makes a museum exhibition true?

Curators rarely........

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