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Terry Newman: Consultants for human rights museum's 'Nakba' exhibit are hardened anti-Israel activists

A 2023 list of members of the Palestinian Content Advisory Network, which is working on the exhibit, shows they have little interest in presenting a historically accurate account

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It looks like critics who were concerned about whether there would be bias in the upcoming Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) exhibit “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present” had cause to be concerned, after all.

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When the exhibit was originally announced last November, I reached out to the museum’s spokesperson, Amanda Gaudes, to inquire about the makeup of the Palestinian Content Advisory Network (PCAN), given that, as per a press release from the Palestinian Canadian Congress, the group played a “central role in making this exhibit possible.” At the time, Gaudes would not reveal who the members were, only that, “It is standard museum protocol to work with advisory networks.”

Terry Newman: Consultants for human rights museum's 'Nakba' exhibit are hardened anti-Israel activists Back to video

The Post recently obtained a list of PCAN members from 2023 that used to exist on the museum’s website. I reached out to Gaudes again to see whether the group’s membership had changed. Gaudes would only say that a list would be made available “closer to the opening of the exhibit.”

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A dive into the names on the list suggests that the committee could be dominated by pro-Palestinian activists, some of whom have published anti-Zionist scholarship, are members of anti-Zionist organizations and support boycott, divestment and sanction (BDS) campaigns against Israel.

Some of its members frame Israel as a colonial and genocidal state and the Palestinians as helpless victims, without providing any historical context for the current situation. If the advisory group includes many of the same members then it is not made up of neutral historians, but activists who appear incapable of producing the kind of accuracy and rigour that should be expected of a taxpayer-funded human rights museum.

The members of the committee in 2023 include: Abigail Bakan, Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Diana Abouali, Idris Elbakri, Nahla Abdo, Najat El-Khairy, Ramsey Zeid, Rana Abdulla and Yara El-Ghadban. Two of the committee members, Bakan, a professor in the department of social justice education at the University of Toronto, and Abu-Laban, a political science professor at University of Alberta, have co-authored numerous anti-Zionist papers.

In a 2010 article, “Israel/Palestine, South Africa and the ‘One-State Solution’: The Case for an Apartheid Analysis,” published in the South African journal Politikon, they “seek to advance discussions of Israel/Palestine by considering the implications of the apartheid analysis in the context of a social justice framing, including considerations of a one-state solution.”

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