The British Museum in London stripped the word “Palestinian” from some of its displays about the Middle East amid pressure from a prominent pro-Israel group.
The Telegraph reported this weekend that UK Lawyers for Israel had written a letter to Nicholas Cullinan, the museum’s director, seeking the removal of that word, specifically in texts that referred to certain peoples as being “of Palestinian descent.”
“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 group reportedly wrote. “It also has the compounding effect of erasing the Kingdoms of Israel and of Judea, which emerged from around 1000 BC, and of re-framing the origins of the Israelites and Jewish people as erroneously stemming from Palestine. The chosen terminology in the items described above implies the existence of an ancient and continuous region called Palestine.”
The group, known as UKLFI for short, has previously been accused of taking action against individuals and institutions that have voiced support for Palestine. In August of last year, one legal complaint against the group alleged “a seeming pattern of vexatious and legally baseless correspondence aimed at silencing and intimidating Palestine solidarity efforts.”
The group’s advocacy has on one notable occasion targeted a museum in the past. After the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, England, showed a work by Forensic Architecture that came with a statement of solidarity in support of Palestine, UKLFI sought the ejection of the museum’s director, Alistair Hudson. He was then asked to leave and promptly departed, in what one museum-focused organization called a “forced resignation.”
The letter to the British Museum appears to have led to at least one change already. The Telegraph reported that that change was made to a map of the New Kingdom that previously described Egyptian forces as having “dominance in Palestine.”
“It is understood that ‘Palestinian descent’ has been changed to read ‘Canaanite descent’ in the Hyksos panel,” the Telegraph reported.
A museum spokesperson said in a statement, “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.”
The museum spokesperson told ARTnews that that the changes were made last year, prior to the UKLFI letter. The Telegraph report did not state when UKLFI sent its letter to Cullinan.
While it remains unclear just how many changes to wall texts at the museum were made, UKLFI greeted the Telegraph report as a victory.
“We welcome the British Museum’s willingness to review and amend terminology which is inaccurate or liable to convey an incorrect meaning today,” the UKLFI said in a statement. “The finding of its audience testing, that the term ‘Palestine’ is in some circumstances no longer meaningful is relevant to and should be taken on board by other museums and cultural institutions. Museums play a vital role in public education, and it is essential that descriptions reflect the historical record with precision and neutrality. These changes are an important step toward ensuring visitors receive an accurate understanding of the ancient Near East.”
