Palestine ambassador protests to UK over 'erasure' from British Museum exhibits
The Palestinian ambassador to the UK has formally complained to the UK Foreign Office over the "erasure" of the word Palestine from exhibits at the British Museum.
Museum officials in February removed the term from exhibits on ancient Egypt and the Phoenicians, saying the word was not “meaningful” as a historical geographical term in that context.
According to the Telegraph, the move followed a letter from the controversial pro-Israel group UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI).
In its letter to museum director Nicholas Cullinan, UKLFI argued that using the term Palestine in the exhibits “has the compounding effect of erasing the kingdoms of Israel and of Judea” and “re-framing the origins of the Israelites and Jewish people as erroneously stemming from Palestine”.
The group specifically objected to labels in displays covering 1700–1500 BC that referred to the eastern Mediterranean coast as “Palestine” and described the Hyksos people as being of “Palestinian descent”.
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Those labels have now been changed to read “Canaan” and “Canaanite descent”.
Officials made the move despite there being references to variants of the name Palestine in ancient Egyptian fragments.
One example is the "Great Harris papyrus", dated to the 12th century BC, which makes one of the earliest references to Palestine, where it is referred to as "peleset", an area that included Gaza and the city of Ashdod in what is Israel today.
Speaking to the Guardian, ambassador Husam Zumlot said the British government had yet to respond to what he said was an "existential issue" for his country, which was recognised as a state by the UK in September.
“I sent a letter to the minister in charge in the Foreign Office, and we are waiting,” Zomlot said on Wednesday.
“For me, 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.”
Denials and contradictions
A British Museum spokesperson in February denied to Middle East Eye that the move had come in response to the UKLFI complaint.
It said the term - one of the earliest names associated with the region along the eastern Mediterranean - was “appropriate for the southern Levant” only 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 spokesperson said.
They added that while the term "Palestine" has been well established in scholarship for around 150 years, the museum has changed the terminology as it is no longer politically neutral.
The campaign group Energy Embargo for Palestine accused the museum of hypocrisy, saying it positions itself as a guardian of artefacts and “the only institution able to preserve, protect and ‘objectively’ communicate their history”.
“And yet after looting Palestinian artefacts from across the Middle East, it is now unreluctantly preparing itself to rewrite history, to erase Palestine, and its millions of people, out of the history books,” the group said in a statement sent to MEE.
The British Museum has repeatedly said it had not removed the term "Palestine" from its exhibits, but this appears to be contradicted by photographic evidence.
In a letter to UKLFI, obtained via a Freedom of Information (FOI) request by the website Unredacted, a museum official wrote that the museum was "in the processes of reviewing and updating panels and labels on a case-by-case basis", and noted that some material had already been changed.
A response to a separate FOI indicated that museum staff had been mindful in reviewing material previously of a critical tweet and retweets "including some by high profile historians" which claimed that the use of the term 'Palestine' in a page of explanatory text about the Phoenicians was "factually wrong".
The British Museum is just one of a slew of public institutions, including councils and hospitals, targeted by UKLFI.
In February, it was reported that Encyclopaedia Britannica had amended several entries to Britannica Kids relating to Palestine, including the removal of the term from maps of the region, following pressure from UKLFI.
One year earlier, London's Chelsea and Westminster hospital removed an artwork designed by schoolchildren in Gaza.
UKLFI director Caroline Turner claimed that the move came in response to "patients' complaints". But a freedom of information request forced the hospital to admit that the only complaint submitted was by the UKLFI.
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