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The Palestinian ambassador to the UK has asked the Foreign Office to intervene after British Museum removed references to Palestine from his presentations.
The UK recognized the state of Palestine in September 2025, but the same year the museum removed the name “Palestine” from the list of modern countries surrounded by the ancient Levant, and replaced it with Gaza and the West Bank.
The ambassador, Husam Zomlot, wanted it to be restored, and he called for a discussion with the museum about the removal of “Palestine” and “Palestine” from the descriptive groups of several exhibits in the Levant and Egyptian ancient rooms.
Zomlot said it was an “erasing” of history at a time when Israel is waging a campaign of extermination against the Palestinian people that several human rights organizations and a report by an independent UN agency have deemed genocide.
Israel has removed ancient remains from areas occupied by Palestinians, and in September last year. they blew up the warehouse of ancient artefacts in Gaza City, at the expense of thirty years of excavation work.
Zomlot was invited to meet with the museum’s director, Nicholas Cullinan, and some of its curators on March 24 but said he was not given anything to change. Instead, he was offered a tour of the museum, which he declined.
“In the absence of a fix, or a clear commitment to address the issues that have been identified, it would not be appropriate to act in a way that could be interpreted as an acceptance of the current situation,” Zomlot wrote to Cullinan on April 9, in a letter seen by the Guardian. New Lines Magazine. The ambassador added that he is ready to continue the talks and will welcome the guests “once the necessary arrangements are made”.
The British Museum said in a statement: “We have never removed the word ‘Palestine’ from our exhibitions and continue to mention it in modern and historical museums and on our website.”
This seems to contradict the photographic evidence of the change, as well as previous comments made at the museum. The name of Palestine remains on some exhibits, such as maps of the ancient Middle East in the Egyptian room.
Since the March meeting, Zomlot has asked the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office to intervene. The British Museum is publicly funded but run by an independent board of trustees, chaired by the former Conservative Chancellor, George Osborne. The ambassador hopes, however, that the UK government will force the museum to comply with its recognition of Palestine.
“I sent a letter to the minister in charge of the foreign office, and we are waiting (for an answer),” said Zomlot. “For me, this is not just a political issue, this is not just a legal issue, this is not just a historical issue. This is an existing issue, because erasing the past is erasing the present.”
A British government spokesman said: “Museums and museums in the UK operate independently of the government, which means that decisions about the management of collections are a matter for their trustees.”
The British Museum has yet to explain the changes, which became public knowledge much later Telegraph They said on 14 February that they had been formed following concerns by the pressure group, UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI).
UKLFI said it had sent a letter for Cullinan argues that “several maps and descriptions reuse the term ‘Palestine’ for periods when there was no such entity and that would distort the history of Israel and the Jews”.
The changes to the show, however, did not happen before the UKLFI letter. Cullinan says he saw the letter only after the Telegraph story was published.
This museum has He did not explain his thoughts. UKLFI quoted the museum as telling the group: “Audience testing has shown that the old usage of the word Palestine … is sometimes no longer meaningful.”
The word “Palestine” has been replaced by “Akanani” in the group of Hyksos rulers of Egypt from the 18th to the 16th century BC, when the reference to Palestine and the Philistines has been removed from the text about the Phoenicians, who the new text says “were known as “Akanani”.
Scholars of the past have often questioned the need for change. Canaan is mentioned frequently in the Bible but in a few late bronze age texts, and when it is, it is often used to refer to various people and places along the coast of what is now called the Levantine.
Peleset, which is believed to be the root of the name Palestine, appears in Egyptian writings from the 12th century BC referring to the Southern Levant region. Before this, the common names of the area were Djahi and Retenu. There are later references to Israel, and the kingdom of Judah is mentioned on a ninth-century BC monument. All these kingdoms lasted several centuries in the iron age, along with the five “Philistine” cities, including Gazawhich is often mentioned in the Hebrew Bible.
Scholars say that Philistia or Palestine is a name that continued over the next few centuries and other forms were used by the Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks and Romans and continued to this day.
“The idea of dispossessing Palestine is incompatible with historical accuracy,” said Marchella Ward, a senior lecturer at the Open University. This word is more accurate than any other word, because it is used repeatedly in history books and not in the books of the Bible, one can say that it is more accurate than other words.”
The picture is confused by the fact that people in ancient times did not think about ethnicities, and foreign words used to refer to people or places may not correspond to what the people called themselves or their country.
Josephine Quinn, a professor of history at the University of Cambridge, said that it is useless and confusing to explain the names that were used thousands of years ago in the Middle East to correspond to what should happen today.
Quinn said: “What worries me is the idea that it’s important, that ancient groups are connected to politics today, or that they can justify or justify genocide in today’s world.”
