British Museum removes word ‘Palestine’ from some displays

Museum revises labelling on maps and panels, saying term used inaccurately and no longer historically neutral

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

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

Concerns were recently raised by UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLIF), a voluntary group of solicitors, about references to “Palestine” in displays covering the ancient Levant and Egypt, which risked “obscuring the history of Israel and the Jewish people”.

In a letter to the museum’s director, Nicholas Cullinan, the group 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.

“It also has the compounding effect of erasing the kingdoms of Israel and of Judea, which emerged from around 1,000BC, and of reframing the origins of the Israelites and Jewish people as erroneously stemming from Palestine.”

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

While several displays have been updated, the museum has said these changes were made last year after feedback and audience research.

It has said while the term “Palestine” was well established in western and Middle Eastern scholarship as a geographical and “neutral” designation for the southern area of the Levant since the late 19th century, it recognised that the term no longer holds a neutral designation and may be understood in reference to political territory.

A spokesperson added: “For the Middle East galleries, for maps showing ancient cultural regions, the term ‘Canaan’ is relevant for the southern Levant in the later second millennium BC.

“We use the UN terminology on maps that show modern boundaries, for example Gaza, West Bank, Israel, 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 for the museum to reverse its decision. The petition claims the move is “not supported by historical evidence and contributes to a wider pattern of erasing Palestinian presence from public memory”.

According to UKLFI, the information panels in the Levant gallery, covering the period 2,000-300BC, have already been updated to describe the history of Canaan and the Canaanites and the rise of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. A panel in the Egypt galleries was amended to replace “Palestinian descent” with “Canaanite descent”.

Further changes are expected as part of the museum’s long-term reconstruction and redisplay programme, and they will be implemented in the coming years.