LONDON: The Palestinian ambassador to the UK, Husam Zomlot, condemned a decision by the British Museum in London to remove the word “Palestine” from certain displays, following pressure from a pro-Israel group.
“Cultural institutions must not become arenas for political campaigns,” the Palestinian Wafa news agency reported Zomlot as saying on Monday. “Palestine exists. It has always existed and it always will.”
The British Museum updated some displays in its ancient Middle East galleries to replace the word “Palestine” with “Canaanite,” The Guardian newspaper reported.
It did so after the group UK Lawyers for Israel expressed concern that the inclusion of the word “Palestine” in displays related to the ancient Levant and Egypt could obscure the “history of Israel and the Jewish people.”
In a letter to the director of the museum, Nicholas Cullinan, they wrote: “Applying a single name — Palestine — retrospectively to the entire region, across thousands of years, erases historical changes and creates a false impression of continuity.”
The museum said it views the word “Palestine” to be no longer considered historically “neutral,” and that it might be interpreted as a reference to political territory.
However, the Palestinian embassy said: “Attempts to cast the very name ‘Palestine’ as controversial risk contributing to a broader climate that normalizes the denial of Palestinian existence at a time when the Palestinian people in Gaza face an ongoing genocide, and their fellow Palestinians in the West Bank face ongoing ethnic cleansing, annexation and state-sponsored violence.”
More than 9,000 people have so far signed a Change.org petition calling on the museum to reverse its decision, arguing that it lacks historical support and erases Palestinian presence from public memory.
