Minichan

The word “Palestine” has been removed from some British Museum displays following complaints from a pro-Israel legal group.

Information boards in the museum’s ancient Middle East galleries, covering the period from 1500BC to 1700BC, had referred to the eastern Mediterranean coast as Palestine, with some individuals described as being “of Palestinian descent”.

Concerns were raised by UK Lawyers for Israel, a voluntary group of solicitors, which argued that the term was being used “retrospectively” to describe civilisations that predated the modern use of the name, according to The Sunday Times.

In a letter to the museum’s director, Nicolas 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 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 museum has since updated several displays. A spokesperson said the term was not always “meaningful” when describing ancient cultural regions and that changes were made following feedback and audience research.

The eastern Mediterranean has been known by different names throughout history. Texts from around 1500BC refer to the region as Canaan. The Kingdom of Israel is first mentioned in an Egyptian inscription dating to around 1200BC. The Greek historian Herodotus referred to “Palestine” in the fifth century BC.

In more recent centuries, the term “Palestine” became widely used as a geographical descriptor. The museum said it uses UN-recognised terminology when referring to modern boundaries, including Gaza, the West Bank, Israel and Jordan, and describes “Palestinian” as a cultural or ethnographic identifier where appropriate.

A British Museum spokesperson said: “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.