The British Museum removes the word “Palestine” from some exhibits British Museum

The British Museum has removed the word “Palestine” from some of its exhibits, saying the term has been used inaccurately and is no longer historically neutral.

Maps and information panels in the museum’s ancient Middle East galleries referred to the eastern coast of the Mediterranean as Palestine, with some people described as being of “Palestinian origin.”

British Lawyers for Israel (UKLIF), a voluntary group of lawyers, recently raised concerns about references to “Palestine” in shows covering the ancient Levant and Egypt, which threaten to “obscure the history of Israel and the Jewish people”.

In a letter to museum director Nicholas Cullinan, the group wrote: “By applying one name – Palestine – retroactively to the entire region, across thousands of years, erases historical changes and creates a false impression of continuity.

“It also has the ripple effect of erasing the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, which emerged from around 1000 B.C., and recasting the origins of the Israelites and the Jewish people as wrongly stemming from Palestine.”

UKLFI said the chosen terminology “implies the existence of an ancient and continuous territory called Palestine”. She asked the museum to review its collections and revise terminology so that the relevant regions would be referred to as Canaan, the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, or Judea, depending on the period being described.

While many of the displays have been updated, the museum said those changes were made last year after feedback and audience research.

She said that although the term “Palestine” had been well-established in Western and Middle Eastern studies as a geographical and “neutral” designation for the southern region of the Levant since the late nineteenth century, she recognized that the term no longer had a neutral designation and could be understood in reference to the political region.

A company spokesperson added: “For Middle East exhibitions, for maps showing ancient cultural areas, the term ‘Canaan’ is appropriate for the southern Levant in the late 2nd millennium BC.

“We use UN terminology on maps showing modern borders, for example Gaza, the West Bank, Israel and Jordan, and refer to ‘Palestinian’ as a cultural or ethnographic identifier where appropriate.”

More than 5,000 people have since signed a Change.org petition calling on the museum to reverse its decision. The petition claims that this move “is not supported by historical evidence and contributes to a broader pattern of erasing the Palestinian presence from public memory.”

According to UKLFI, information panels in the Levant exhibition, covering the period from 2000 to 300 BC, have already been updated to describe the history of Canaan, the Canaanites and the rise of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. A plaque in Egyptian galleries was modified to replace the phrase “Palestinian origin” with “Canaanite origin.”

Further changes are expected to be made as part of the museum’s long-term rebuilding and remodeling programme, and will be implemented in the coming years.