By ITAY ZUTRA Growing up in Israel I did not personally know any Palestinians. In my coastal hometown Rehovot there were no Arab residents. It was founded in 1890 by Russian Jewish settlers who bought the land from its Arab owners only to turn its inhabitants into laborers. Yemenite Jews settled there later to replace the now turned hostile Arabs. I first encountered Arabs in Hebrew kids’ books portraying them as savages, resembling the way Native Americans were portrayed in the books of the racist German writer Karl May, which were also available in my school library. I do remember the groups of Palestinian men coming into town early in the morning to wait for Israeli contractors who would then hire them as construction workers for low wages and no rights. At the end of the workday, they travelled the long way back to their families in the West Bank and Gaza carrying identity cards marking them as foreigners, as “others” (an example of such a card is featured in the exhibit). Legally they were not allowed to even spend the night in Rehovot.

In school we were taught the following narrative: Jews were exiled from their ancestral homeland by the Romans only to wander around the world for thousands of years, displaced and tormented by all, waiting for the right time to move back home and, like in the biblical book of Joshua, destroy all their enemies, revive the Hebrew language, and build a nation of strong, invincible, and chosen Jews, never to be defeated again. This Zionist narrative was termed “the negation of the diaspora”, and diaspora Jews were portrayed as degenerate victims who will be resurrected in the hot Mediterranean sun who would finally make them human again.

But this overly nationalistic narrative did not make much sense to me (an avid book lover): my paternal grandparents were born in Poland and spoke Polish and Yiddish, while my maternal grandparents spoke English and Yiddish. During Jewish holidays we feasted on gefilte fish, matzo ball soup, chopped liver, and compote for dessert. On occasion we went out for what was considered “oriental restaurants” to eat such exotic foods like humus and kebabs, served to us by Israeli Arabs, who came from what seemed to be far away lands.

I asked myself, ‘where do my family come from?’ Years later, and in some ways countering my mom’s journey from New York to Rehovot, I became a New Yorker – a PhD student in Yiddish literature. There, I learned about the millions of Jews escaping poverty and racism in Imperial Russia, calling New York home. They attended public schools and universities, belonged to unions, and wrote in Yiddish – wich was then replaced by their American born children with English. Read Philip Roth.

I did not know much about Winnipeg when I assumed a teaching position in Jewish Studies at the University of Manitoba. I teach my students about Jewish accomplishments as well as hardships in many diasporas, and about Jews’ ability to reinvent themselves and stay alive. Last year, on Canada Day, I became a Canadian citizen. My Manitoba-born Metis Jewish wife let me live on her ancestral homeland. She loves me. On the opening night of the Nakba exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, we broke bread with fellow Palestinian Canadians, who were also victims of racism and displacement. We chose to learn, eat, drink, and love and say no to hate.

Dr. Itay Zutra
Jewish Studies Instructor, University of Manitoba

By BERNIE BELLAN Since I wrote my last piece about my interviews with the curator of the Nakba exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Isabelle Masson, and the CEO of the CMHR, Isha Khan, I’ve heard from many different individuals about those interviews.
The general tenor of the comments I heard was that I had conducted fair interviews.

I asked some tough questions, people told me, but I listened to what Isabelle and Isha had to say, and I didn’t conduct the interviews with a pre-conceived agenda either to grill them or to allow them to conduct some kind of public relations exercise that would justify what they had done.
Since then I’ve spoken to so many people – most of whom haven’t actually seen the exhibit, who were either very critical of the notion of even allowing an exhibit with the name “Nakba” in it or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, said the exhibit didn’t go far enough in condemning the Israeli “genocide” in Gaza.
Look – I’m not out to curry favour with anyone. The Jewish Post (of which I used to be publisher) has become much more right wing than I would have liked by containing a disproportionate number of Myron Love pieces. I understand the publisher’s doing that – Myron is a prolific writer and he does cover the waterfront when it comes to reporting on Jewish personalities in Winnipeg. But Myron is as far right wing as one can be – and I always heavily censored him when he veered into fanatical support for Israel which, to his mind, can never do any wrong.
I’ve spent a great deal of time reading about Israel’s history around the time of the creation of the state, also discussing that period with individuals who are very knowledgable about the subject. The key question for me is not whether a great many of the Palestinians who left Israel in 1948 left voluntarily (which, I tend to think, based on what I’ve read, was not the case; the vast majority were expelled.)
Rather, the key question for me is: Could a Jewish state ever have come about if it had a majority Arab population – which would have been the case if 750,000 Palestinians had not left? The answer, I would submit, and as was voiced by many Jewish leaders of the state at the time, is absolutely not.
You might not like to read that – or even to acknowledge that was what was behind the expulsion of the vast majority of Palestinian residents of Israel, but in terms of realpolitik, expelling the majority of Palestinians was a prerequisite to the creation of a Jewish state. I don’t offer an opinion here as to the morality of that. The history of the world is a history of displacement of populations, including right here in Canada, with what happened to the original indigenous inhabitants of what became Canada. I’ll leave that to you, the reader, to judge whether it was necessary to expel 750,000 Palestinians.

Now, where I had difficulty with the Nakba exhibit wasn’t in its telling the story of what happened in 1948. It’s in its recurrent descriptions in such negative terms of what has happened afterward – without once mentioning the violence perpetrated by Palestinians themselves against Israelis, that I thought exposed a clear bias on the part of the exhibit’s organizers.
But, there’s been quite an over reaction within the Jewish community – both here, and elsewhere – such as in the National Post, to that exhibit. Yes, clearly the people who put the Nakba exhibit together had an agenda to excoriate Israel. If you take a look again at my interview with Isabelle Masson, the curator of the exhibit, she spoke in such bafflegab that I don’t think she cared a whit when I questioned her about why the exhibit referred to what even Palestinians termed the “Intifada” as nothing more than an “uprising.”
Isha Khan, in contrast, did give me the impression that she was more concerned about the suggestion that the CMHR had not consulted sufficiently with Jewish groups – and she did attempt to answer that question, but I found her answer disingenuous.

Leaving aside the entire issue of the CMHR exhibit, there is a broader question that most readers of The Jewish Post newspaper are probably not likely to consider and that is the drastic change in attitudes of many Jews toward Israel. (Since I don’t really know who reads this website – and I don’t allow comments because I get inundated with spam comments if I do, I don’t have a clue who is actually looking at this website.)

While readers of the Jewish Post may be prepared to read unsettling opinions – such as what I have just offered about the truth about the creation of the state of Israel – let’s be honest: I’m quite familiar with who the majority of subscribers to that paper are – after having been co-publisher, then publisher, of the paper for over 40 years. The vast majority of readers are older, firmly supportive of Israel – no matter what Israel does, and not particularly interested in reading criticisms of Israel. I don’t think the majority are as extreme in their support for Israel as Myron Love (whose opinion pieces you’re not going to read on this website), but they’re certainly not going to easily accept the notion that the vast majority of Palestinians were expelled from Israel in 1948. No, they’re going to prefer the old argument that leaders of Arab nations told the Arab inhabitants of what was then Palestine to pick up their things and leave because they were going to soon be able to return once the Jews were driven into the sea.

But, how then are readers going to react to a headline like this, which wasn’t printed in an antisemitic newspaper, it came from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “60% of Americans have an unfavorable view of Israel, up sharply since 2022, survey shows,” which was published in April this year. And then, there was this headline this week in the “Forward,” America’s leading Jewish publication: “Mamdani more popular than Netanyahu among U.S. Jews, new poll shows.”
There has been a major change in attitudes among American Jews toward Israel. How much Canadian Jews’ attitudes have changed we simply don’t know because there is hardly ever any polling down among Canadian Jews.
But last week there was a piece in the Free Press by Ben Waldman about Jacob Brodovsky, the former co-executive director of BB Camp, who was forced to resign his position after a concerted campaign was mounted by certain elements within the Jewish community to force him out for his supposedly “anti-Zionist” views. In that article Jacob lamented how traumatic that experience was for him – and that it’s led him wanting to remain totally disconnected from the Jewish community here.
As I also noted in a piece that was published on this website – about a recently held community “town hall” (which wasn’t really a town hall at all – it was simply an opportunity for certain leaders of Jewish organizations to brag about how much they’ve done and to lash out at the CMHR for putting on that Nakba exhibit), there are a great many Winnipeg Jews who are also similarly alienated from Winnipeg’s established Jewish community.

No – the vast majority of those people don’t read the Jewish Post (although when I was publisher I did hear from a few individuals from time to time who congratulated me for having the courage to criticize the Jewish establishment here), but I would dare suggest there are a lot more people who feel the way Jacob Brodovsky does than leaders of our established Jewish organizations would like to think – not that it’s going to change their minds by reading what I have to say.

Still, a few of them do honestly seem interested in hearing different opinions -which is why I suggested they hold another town hall but, this time make a deliberate effort to include people like Jacob Brodovsky (who, I doubt, would be interested in coming), or even – heaven forbid, members of organizations like Independent Jewish Voices).
In summing up – is it too much to ask that people, even readers of the Jewish Post, try to have an open mind about things? Also, be aware that attitudes toward Israel have changed drastically in the past couple of years – and it’s not all about antisemitism – it’s about what Israel has done – and is still doing – in Gaza.
Perhaps in a future issue of the Jewish Post, if the publisher allows me, I’ll expand upon why I think antisemitism has risen so sharply – and how “educating” people isn’t going to make a damn bit of difference.

(June 8, 2024) Introduction: We received the following email from a young Jewish Winnipegger re the BB Camp controversy, which we’ve reported on extensively on this website. We thought it important to post the email as a separate piece rather than as an add-on to an article in which we printed other emails from readers expressing their disappointment at what happened to Jacob Brodovsky, the former co-executive director of BB Camp:

Dear Mr. Bellan,

Thank you for once again cutting through the noise with your April 23rd column, “What the sordid BB Camp affair says about our community.” Your clarity and courage in calling out our rush to judgment and our narrowing definition of “Jewish identity” are deeply appreciated, especially by those of us who feel increasingly alienated in Winnipeg.

I also want to share a troubling observation about one of the loudest voices attacking Jacob Brodovsky: theJ.ca. Their articles—bylines like “Ron East” or “TheJ.ca Staff”—are, in fact, almost entirely generated by artificial intelligence. They contain no verifiable sourcing, frequently hallucinate details, and appear to be little more than a far-right newsletter running smear campaigns under the guise of “journalism.” The entire BB Camp series reads like an AI trained on extremist talking points, regurgitated daily to bully our community into silence.

As a young Jew in Winnipeg, I—and many of my peers—are horrified by the transformation we’re witnessing. What was once a warm, progressive community is now dominated by:

Bigots and Bullies: Parents threatening to pull their kids unless the camp bows to extremist demands.

Florida-style Republican Judaism: A narrow, intolerant ideology portrayed as the only “true” Jewishness.

Collapsing Leadership: Our Jewish Federation leaders, including Jeff Lieberman, have shown they lack the vision or backbone to navigate this crisis.

We stand at a dangerous inflection point. Our community is on the verge of a total and irreversible fascist takeover—an outcome no amount of regret or retrospective apologies can undo.

Please consider reading firsthand accounts from community members who have bravely spoken out:

I know this letter is anonymous and won’t be published, but I hope you see it as proof that many of us are desperate for ethical, forward-looking leadership. Thank you again for using your platform to remind us what Jewish community should mean: diversity of thought, compassion for all people, and the moral courage to call out extremism—no matter where it comes from.

This was NEVER a community of far-right Israelis. This is a shame beyond words.

With gratitude and urgency,

A Concerned Young Jew in Winnipeg

Post script: We had heard from many different sources (who all asked to remain anonymous) that the Jewish Federation’s decision to force the BB Camp board to fire Jacob Brodovsky came as a result of pressure from one or more big donors to the Combined Jewish Appeal. We sent an email to Jeff Lieberman, asking Jeff whether the Jewish Federation’s decision to force the resignation of Jacob Brodovsky as co-executive director of BB Camp came as a result of a donor (or donors) to the Combined Jewish Appeal threatening to withdraw their donation(s) this year unless Jacob were fired. I don’t think anyone would be surprised to learn that Jeff did not bother responding to my request for information.

The Jewish Federation used to advertise elections to its board in The Jewish Post & News for many years, but no longer does so (in the Jewish Post). Instead, it submits a slate of new appointees to its board to members of the current board to be rubber stamped. Is it any surprise that the donors who contribute the most money call the shots for the Federation (which is as its always been. The only difference is the Jewish Federation and the Winnipeg Jewish Community Council before it used to operate with a patina of democracy. Sadly, that is no longer the case.)

We would urge anyone on the Federation board who could give information about what led the board to force the resignation of Jacob Brodovsky to contact us. We would give full anonymity, as we have to the writer of the above letter.

-Bernie Bellan