🌿 Campaign Update: Responding to UKLFI’s Letter to the British Museum (7 Feb 2026)
UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) sent a letter to the British Museum on 7 February 2026, claiming that the museum’s use of the term “Palestine” in exhibits covering 1700–1500 BC is “historically inaccurate.” They argue the region should instead be labelled Canaan, or divided into ancient entities such as the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, Philistia, or Phoenicia.

They further claim that using “Palestine” for earlier periods “erases Jewish history,” and they object to modern Palestinian cultural items being displayed in the Ancient Levant gallery, saying it implies an “unbroken cultural lineage.” UKLFI urges the museum to replace “Palestine” with terms like Canaan, Judea, Samaria, or the Levant.

🌿 Challenging UKLFI’s Claims
These arguments are selective, misleading, and ignore well‑established historical evidence:

1. “Palestine” is not an anachronism — it appears in ancient sources.
The name Palaistinê appears in Herodotus (5th century BC), long before the Roman renaming of 135 AD. Classical Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and medieval Islamic sources all use variations of the term.

2. The region has always had overlapping names.
Canaan, Philistia, Judea, Samaria, Galilee, Phoenicia, and Palestine all refer to different cultural, political, or geographic layers of the same region across time. No historian treats these names as mutually exclusive.

3. UKLFI’s framing erases Palestinian history.
By insisting that “Palestine” cannot be used at all, even in later periods, UKLFI attempts to sever Palestinians from their documented historical presence — a pattern seen across multiple UK institutions.

4. The museum’s responsibility is accuracy, not political pressure.
Museums routinely use historically layered names (e.g., “Mesopotamia,” “Anatolia,” “Persia/Iran”). There is no scholarly justification for removing “Palestine” entirely.

5. The Equality Act argument is unfounded.
Historical terminology cannot be “harassment.” Academic consensus, not political lobbying, should guide museum labels.

🌿 Why This Matters
Removing the word “Palestine” is not a neutral curatorial decision. It contributes to a wider pattern of erasing Palestinian history from public institutions — a pattern documented by the European Legal Support Center (ELSC), which has recorded 900 incidents of anti‑Palestinian repression in the UK, with UKLFI involved in 128 of them.

Our campaign continues to call for:

the restoration of the term “Palestine”
transparency about why it was removed
protection of historical accuracy from political interference
Erasing a word erases a people.