LONDON: Palestinian officials and academic critics have accused the British Museum of historical erasure and, in the words of a widely signed open letter, “complicity in genocide” after the museum removed the words “Palestine” and “Palestinian” from explanatory panels accompanying several exhibits in its Levant and Egyptian galleries.
In February, Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to the UK, became aware of controversial changes to several museum labels.
For example, until sometime last year, the panel introducing Gallery 57 read: “The ancient Levant comprises modern Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and western Syria.”
The replacement panel reads: “The ancient Levant comprises modern Jordan, Israel, Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon and western Syria.”
Left: The current introductory label for gallery 57. Center: The label before the change in 2025, taken from a virtual tour of the gallery. Right: A close-up of the original label clearly showing the reference to “modern Palestine.” (Photo: Supplied)
Palestine had vanished. That, as Zomlot protested to the British Museum, was unacceptable, especially after the British government had recognized the State of Palestine in September 2025.
“The removal of the name ‘Palestine’ from these panels constitutes an erasure of the State of Palestine in the present,” the Palestine Embassy complained in a letter to the museum.
In March, Zomlot met the museum’s director, Nicholas Cullinan, but came away with only an invitation to a guided tour of the museum.
“No thanks,” Zomlot wrote in an April 9 reply to the offer.
“In the absence of corrective action, or a clear commitment to address the issues identified, it would not have been appropriate to engage further in a manner that could be interpreted as an endorsement of the current presentation.”
Since then, protests have been held on the museum’s steps, and academics have criticized it for what a widely signed open letter describes as an “act of historical revision and potential erasure.”
Pro-Palestine and anti-Zionist Jewish activists protest outside the British Museum in London on February 21, 2026. (Kristian Buus/In Pictures via Getty Images)
The open letter to the museum was signed by more than 200 academics, artists, individuals and groups including Jewish Artists for Palestine, the British Palestinian Committee and Archaeologists Against Apartheid, Novara Media, a left-wing British outlet, reported on March 11.
“Genocide,” the letter states, “extends to the cultural and historical erasure of a people, which places enormous responsibility on cultural and heritage institutions such as The British Museum to avoid complicity in genocide, either through its representation of Palestinians and their history or by providing direct support to those that perpetrate or profit from that genocide.”
FASTFACTS:
• The panel introducing Gallery 57 previously read: “The ancient Levant comprises modern Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and western Syria.”
• The replacement panel reads: “The ancient Levant comprises modern Jordan, Israel, Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon and western Syria.”
• The online introduction to Gallery 57 reads “The Ancient Levant corresponds to the modern states of Syria (western part), Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Jordan.”
A separate petition on Change.org garnered more than 26,900 signatures by May 21. It called on the British Museum to “restore the term ‘Palestine,’ provide transparency regarding the decision-making process, ensure that curatorial choices reflect historical accuracy, not political pressure, and uphold its responsibility as a publicly funded institution to present history with integrity.”
The suspicion among academics is that the British Museum is the latest institution to have yielded to pressure from UK Lawyers for Israel. UKLFI was founded in 2011 by a group of British lawyers who said they were “concerned about the failure to combat the use and abuse of law by enemies of Israel.”
The controversy erupted following a press release by UKLFI on Feb. 14, in which it said it had written to the museum to complain that “several maps and descriptions retroactively apply the term ‘Palestine’ to periods in which no such entity existed and risk obscuring the history of Israel and the Jewish people.”
Husam Zomlot, head of the Palestinian mission to the United Kingdom, attending a ceremony after the British government announced on Sunday the country's formal recognition of a Palestinian state, at the mission's headquarters in London on September 22, 2025. (Reuters)
Arab News has seen a copy of the response sent to UKLFI by the British Museum on Feb. 12, signed by its head of strategic communications.
“Audience testing,” it read in part, “has shown that the historic use of the term Palestine — which was well established in Western and Middle Eastern scholarship as a geographical designation for a region — is in some circumstances no longer meaningful.”
It continued: “As a result, we are in the processes of reviewing and updating panels and labels on a case-by-case basis.” The museum had, it added, “recently updated ‘Palestinian descent’ to read ‘Canaanite descent’” on a panel in the Egypt galleries.
Approached for comment by Arab News, the British Museum declined to explain why it had made changes prompted by “audience testing,” rather than as a result of rigorous academic procedures.
This month, Zomlot appealed to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office to intervene, although that appears unlikely.
As a spokesperson said at the time, “Museums and galleries in the UK operate independently of the government, which means that decisions relating to the management of their collections are a matter for their trustees.”
“For me,” Zomlot told a British newspaper, “this is not only a political issue. This is not only a legal issue. This is not even just a historical issue. This is an existential issue. Because erasing our past is erasing our present.”
Nicholas Cullinan, director of the British Museum. (AFP file photo)
The British Museum has denied doing any such thing but has nonetheless refused to answer questions or engage in any debate about the issue.
This week, Arab News requested an interview with a responsible curator. The museum’s communications team replied: “We won’t be putting forward anyone for interview — please refer to our statement which you have from February.”
That statement, which was released on Feb. 16, reads: “It has been reported that the British Museum has removed the term Palestine from displays. It is simply not true.”
Later that same day, however, Cullinan, the director of the museum, bypassed his own press office and released a statement through the British historian and author William Dalrymple.In a post on X, Dalrymple wrote that after a chat with “the excellent new director of the British Museum,” he could reveal that “the story about ... the BM cancelling the name Palestine is a complete misrepresentation of the facts.”
Historian William Dalrymple (left) with Esther Freud (center) and Hanan Ashrawi at PalFest 2008. (Wikimedia Commons)
Cullinan had told him that “we are not removing mention of Palestine from our labels,” but then added: “We amended two panels in our ancient Levant gallery last year during a regular gallery refresh, when some wording was amended to reflect historical terms.”
In other words, the word Palestine was erased, such as from the Gallery 57 panels, as mentioned at the beginning of this article.
There have been other changes as well. On a panel in Gallery 4, for example, the phrase “Palestinian descent” has been changed to “Canaanite descent.”
Perhaps reflecting the hurried nature of the changes that have been made, the memo about Palestine seems not to have reached the museum’s digital team. Online, the introduction to Gallery 57 still reads “The Ancient Levant corresponds to the modern states of Syria (western part), Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Jordan.”
Left: The more recent Phoenician panel, with no reference to Palestine. Right: The previous version of the panel with reference to both Palestine and the Philistines. (Photo: Supplied)
Some academics say they have been left flabbergasted not only by the changes but also by the opaque reasoning behind them.
Marchella Ward, a lecturer in classical studies at the Open University, accompanied the Palestinian ambassador to his meeting at the British Museum in March.
“The members of the museum’s curatorial team were there and I’d expected that meeting to be a conversation among professionals in the ancient world, and to hear an explanation,” she told Arab News.
“But we weren’t given any explanation whatsoever. We’ve had precisely nothing to go on from the British Museum in terms of how this curatorial decision has been made, and that’s very disappointing from a museum, which you would think would be open to critical discussions.”
Such discussions might, she conceded, center on the complexities of assigning names to peoples and places in the ancient world.
“It is true that, on the whole, the earlier you get, the more difficult it gets, because we’re in a world before nation states and the sort of fixed identities that we would imagine today.
“People didn’t go around saying ‘I’m Greek’ or ‘I’m Canaanite’.”
In antiquity, she added, “Canaan and Palestine are both terms that are used at about the same time for about the same place. So there is some complexity.
“But the word Palestine is attested from around the 13th century BCE onwards, and in a way that is really very continuous, and also in lots of different languages, by different cultures and ethnic groups.
“It is such a widely used word, in Egyptian, in Assyrian and later in Greek. Famously, you have ‘Palestina,’ which the Romans used, but it’s often erroneously said that that’s the first appearance of the word.”
Among the responses in February was one on X from Haim Bresheeth, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
“To remove the name of this region, Palestine, and replace it with a Zionist term is an act of stupidity and arrogance which will make you the laughingstock of all academic researchers worth their salt,” he wrote.
Speaking to Arab News, he said: “It is wrong historically, academically and morally.
“The museum should use proper terminology that is used in all other museums and should not be afraid to do.”
He added: “This is Palestine we’re talking about, and that is why they don’t want the word to be used, because Palestine should be silenced, canceled and disappeared — the people and the country. This is what this story is about. It’s not about history.”
Critics of UKLFI say it has a long record of pressuring British institutions to toe the Israeli government line.
In 2023 it objected to artwork by Palestinian schoolchildren who attended two UN schools in Gaza, that was on display at the entrance to the children’s outpatients department at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London as part of a collaboration with young British patients.
In January, the Open University resisted UKLFI demands to remove the phrase “ancient Palestine” from learning materials.
But in February, The Jerusalem Post reported that Encyclopaedia Britannica had yielded to pressure to amend ancient maps and “remove present-tense descriptions defining Palestine as the whole territory ‘between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.’”
More broadly, erasure by Israel of Palestinian history and heritage is not limited to interference in museum labels.
A view of the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem. (X: @tcf_updates)
AIn September 2025, staff at the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem were forced to hurriedly rescue three decades of archaeological finds from Gaza after the Israeli military announced that the building in which the priceless artifacts were stored was to be bombed.
Not everything could be saved.
“Many items have been broken or lost, but they had been photographed or drawn, so the scientific information is preserved,” archaeologist Rene Elter said at the time.
“Perhaps that will be the only trace that remains of Gaza’s archaeology — in books, publications, libraries.”
