More than 200 cultural figures have signed an open letter criticising the British Museum for allegedly removing the word “Palestine” from its labels in response to pressure from the advocacy group UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI). The petition, whose signatories include the musician Brian Eno, the writer Laleh Khalili, and the former Central Saint Martins head Jeremy Till, calls the removal “an act of historical revision and potential erasure”.
The letter, published on 11 March, further links the current dispute to the “museum’s complicity in Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, from hosting the Israeli Embassy for a private party last year to defending its partnership with BP,” which it says supplies fuel to the Israeli military. On 13 May 2025, the British Museum hosted a private event marking the anniversary of the founding of Israel, organised by the Israeli embassy in London. BP did not respond to a request for comment.
The labels controversy surfaced last month in a story in the Daily Telegraph, which said that the British Museum had made changes to the interpretation on the labels in the museum’s Ancient Levant and Egyptian galleries “after concerns were raised by UK Lawyers for Israel, a voluntary association of lawyers.”
The British Museum rebuffed the assertion, telling The Art Newspaper in a statement on 3 March: “It has been reported that the British Museum has removed the term Palestine from displays. It is simply not true. We continue to use Palestine across a series of galleries, both contemporary and historic.”
The Art Newspaper has looked into the complaint and corroborated the British Museum director Nicholas Cullinan’s alleged assertion that changes to the labels were made prior to the letter that the UKLFI sent to the British Museum in early February. Cullinan’s remarks were recounted secondhand through a post on X by the historian William Dalrymple, and to date the museum has only issued the brief statement quoted above. Several scholars interviewed by The Art Newspaper, however, queried the wording used in the new labels.
The Ancient Levant gallery, the main space in question, contains artefacts from the Ancient Levant dating from 7500 BC to 332 BC. During the time the region—which covers present-day Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and parts of Syria—was ruled by the Egyptian, Hittite, Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian empires.
Many of the artefacts in the gallery were discovered in settlements such as Tell Halaf, an Iron Age settlement in northeastern Syria, and Tell Umm Hammad, dating from the Bronze Age in Jordan. The stories they tell show the extensive trade and commerce of the time, particularly via sea-faring civilisations such as the Phoenicians. The interpretation in the gallery includes wall texts and a map.
In the original version of a panel introducing the Phoenicians, seen by The Art Newspaper, the label read: “By the beginning of the first millennium BC the Israelites occupied most of Palestine except for the southern coastal strip, which continued to be held by the Philistines.” It then goes on to discuss the other regional powers of the Aramaean kingdoms and the Phoenicians.
The new panel, also titled “The Phoenicians”, replaces “Palestine” with a reference to the Syro-Lebanese coast. It reads: “The Greek word ‘Phoenicians’ describe the people living on the Syro-Lebanese coast, who were known locally as ‘Canaanites’.” It then gives context about the Phoenicians, who were active from 1200 BC to 300 BC.
The Art Newspaper understands that the Ancient Levant wall labels were amended in early 2025, following staff changes in the Middle Eastern department. According to interviews with multiple former curators and individuals affiliated with the museum, the labels were updated according to the most recent scholarship, such as the move to use the terms for ancient people by which they were known at the time, and to refresh a display that had grown tired.
The letter that was sent to the British Museum from the advocacy group UK Lawyers for Israel came a year after these changes. It was sent to Cullinan on 6 February 2026 following “a number of approaches from individuals who were concerned about what they believed to be historically inaccurate or anachronistic descriptions in the British Museum’s Ancient Levant and Egypt galleries,” according to a spokesperson for the UKLFI. The spokesperson also tells The Art Newspaper that a number of letters had been sent by members of the public directly to the museum on the subject prior to the February letter.
The British Museum’s February reply to the UKLFI letter, seen by The Art Newspaper, affirms that the institution had already made changes to the labels. Sent by the museum’s director of strategy communications, it reads: “Audience testing 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.”
The information panels in the Egyptian galleries have also been changed, with the words “Canaanite descent” now replacing “Palestinian descent”.
Continued discontent
While the labels were not changed in response to the UKLFI complaint, The Art Newspaper spoke to multiple scholars who queried the wording used on the replacements.
The removal of the reference to “Palestine” and the “Philistines” matters because of an opinion, which is widely discredited and considered an anti-Palestinian position, that “Palestine” does not exist as a term in the ancient world, therefore negating the Palestinian claim to the land. Scholars approached by The Art Newspaper confirm the word “Palestine” appears in Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, Latin and other texts, and that it is the most widely used term from the Late Bronze Age onwards throughout classical antiquity.
“The claim that the change of terminology is about historical accuracy is misleading,” says Marchella Ward, who teaches Classical Studies at the Open University. “The term ‘ancient Palestine’ is simply the most common term for this region in antiquity.”
The changes requested by the UKFLI also concern the promotion of the term “Canaan”. UKFLI’s letter to the British Museum said: “Applying the term “Palestine” to the region in the maps and descriptions mentioned above [in the Ancient Levant and Egypt galleries] is historically inaccurate and misleading. During the time period 1795 BC to around 1,000 BC, this area was known as Canaan.”
The term “Canaan” is one of many terms used to refer to the region in antiquity, says Ward, but while it is the most commonly used term in the Bible it is less common in historical sources. However, it has become the preferred term in politicised accounts of history, which overwhelmingly use the Bible as a source. These differ from accepted scholarship that looks at a variety of accounts, she says.
The use of the term Canaan also features in a related complaint that the UKLFI raised with the Liverpool World Museum in November 2025. According to information from UKLFI, the group “calls for revisions to three labels in the Ancient Egypt gallery that use the term ‘Palestine’ when describing events from the third and second millennia BC. UKLFI has asked the museum to “use contemporary or neutral terms such as ‘Canaan’ or ‘the Levant’”.
The Liverpool World Museum confirmed that the letter was received, and that it was discussed by the director and head of the museum, but did not elaborate on any steps taken since.
Palestine in the British Museum
The British Museum did not respond to a request for more information about the changes made to the Ancient Levant and Egyptian galleries. But in the remarks reported by Dalrymple on X, the British Museum director pointed towards the museum’s usage of Palestine elsewhere in the museum.
This includes a display case, focused on the issue of migration and displacement, that is in the Ancient Levant gallery and organised by the same department who changed the labels. The display—which contains dolls bearing traditional Palestinian embroidery, among other contemporary items from the Levant, including works by the Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige—was itself objected to in the UKFLI complaint, because the Palestinian dolls created “a false impression of continuity”.
Other displays, in the Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic world, show Palestinian material. One showcases tatreez, the Palestinian embroidery, while another features material related to Gaza and early photographs of the region from the museum’s collection.
The Art Newspaper understands from various figures associated with the museum that this display received added scrutiny with escalated levels of approval and nearly two years of delay before going on display last autumn. The British Museum was contacted for comment about the increased scrutiny to the display case, but it issued no comment.
