Name war at the British Museum: academic rigor or human and cultural erasure?

LondonLess than 100 meters from the British Museum, in the iconic London Review Bookshop, one of the first titles a customer encounters upon entering is the new edition of a 1979 classic. The PalestiniansThe book, written by journalist Jonathan Dimbleby and illustrated by photographer Don McCullin, began with a prologue explaining why the book was necessary at that time. Words that, almost half a century later, still resonate powerfully.

Dimbleby was referring to the tenth anniversary of a statement made by the then Prime Minister of Israel, Golda Meir (1969-1974), in The Washington Post a couple of months after coming to power, and which are endorsed today by Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich and so many other Zionist leaders, who have committed war crimes or genocide in Gaza"There is no such thing as Palestinians. They don't exist," Meir told the American newspaper. Dimbleby disagreed, calling the statement "a blatant falsehood."

To prove it, he wrote the book, interviewing the old people who were children when the Balfour Declaration (1917) – a letter issued by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, in which the United Kingdom expressed support for the establishment of a "national home" for the Jewish people in Palestine – and paved the way for the exodus from Palestine –the Nakba of 1948—coinciding with the creation of the state of Israel—. He also spoke with children born in the diaspora and in refugee camps, who were later willing to participate in guerrilla warfare, acts of terrorism, and intifadas to respond to Israeli aggression rather than renounce their right to a land in permanent dispute.

In any case, the harrowing testimonies collected by Dimbleby and an extraordinary gallery of intimate and profoundly human images that accompanied them demonstrated what Meir wanted to deny: the existence of the Palestinians as a people and as a people linked to a specific territory. But since when? What is that territory? Is it only what stretches from the Jordan River to the sea? Does it also include what lies east of the Jordan? How has this population evolved over not decades, but millennia? And the borders? What is the historiographical and archaeological debate on this matter?

A not innocent choice

The truth is that Palestine and Palestinians are not innocent words. Using them or not, erasing them from maps or keeping them, has or can have obvious political connotations. And in recent days, some critics of the British Museum believe that the famous institution in the Bloomsbury neighborhood—which sees itself as "the museum of the world," despite the colonial legacy and plunder it bears—has sided with Golda Meir by removing the name of Palestine from some of its Ancient Egypt exhibits.

The conservative British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph It was reported last weekend. It also stated that this action was taken in response to complaints from a pro-Israel lawyers' lobby. UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI)The UKLFI, which had denounced in a letter to the museum's management "the anachronistic and incorrect use of the toponym Palestine for certain galleries and periods," argued that "applying a single name—Palestine—retrospectively to the entire region, over thousands of years, erases historical changes and creates a false impression of continuity." This, among other premises, contradicts official Israeli policy, the same policy championed by Golda Meir. The controversy became obvious with a change to an information panel about the Hyksos, a people who ruled part of present-day Egypt some 3,500 years ago. Where the museum previously stated they were of "Palestinian descent," it now describes them as "of Canaanite descent," a geographical and cultural designation for the peoples of the southern Levant during the Bronze Age. The museum defends itself under the guise of "historical accuracy." However, this terminological precision seems to be applied with surgical accuracy only where the name Palestine might cause discomfort. For critics, it is not a question of chronology, but of gaslighting historical: use the truth of 1500 BC.

Not surprisingly, the Palestinian representative to the British government, Husam Zomlot, has protested through the media. He stated: "Attempts to portray the name Palestine as controversial risk contributing to a broader climate that normalizes the denial of Palestinian existence at a time when the Palestinian people of Gaza are facing ongoing genocide, and their fellow Palestinians in the West Bank are facing the state" of Israel.

History, or its interpretation, is not immutable over time. It can suffer shameful manipulations or minor tremors that seek to add nuance to narratives that seemed eternal. The Irish historian Connal Parr, of Northumbria University in Newcastle, confirms this: "To be fair, history is always changing, and the way history is presented in the public sphere is also constantly changing." That said, Parr also comments that, despite the museum's excuses, the changes reflect "the power of this lobby, which is very well organized."

The museum has also commented that for the Middle East galleries, on maps showing ancient cultural regions, the term Canaan is relevant to the southern Levant at the end of the second millennium BC. "We use UN terminology on maps showing modern borders, for example Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, and Jordan, and we refer to Palestinian as a cultural or ethnographic identifier when appropriate." However, it cannot be said that the toponym Palestine has been erased from all the museum's rooms. At least, not yet. A visit to the area where the monumental remains of Ramses II are located is proof of this. The maps clearly indicate Palestine as the area between the Jordan River and the sea, which includes what is now the West Bank, Israel, and the Gaza Strip.

The reality, in any case, is much more complex than a well-intentioned headline, which, in the case of Sunday TelegraphIt was rowing in favor of the interests of the State of Israel and, incidentally, served as propaganda for the strength of a very active lobby, one with considerable power and influence in the United Kingdom. The British Council's management has also confirmed that the new display of information panels dates back to early 2025, well before the letter from the pro-Israel lawyers' lobby was received.

The Weight of the Roman Past

Proponents of the controversial revision insist that the name Palestine is "an old colonial imposition." Douglas J. Feith, of the Hudson Institute and a former member of the Democratic administration in the United States from 2001 to 2005, wrote in an article a little over four years ago that it was "the ancient Romans who fixed the name in the Land of Israel." According to his thesis, "in 135 AD, once the second insurrection in the province of Judea was suppressed, the Romans changed the province's name to Syria Palaestina." "They did so out of resentment, as punishment, for erasing the link between the Jews and the province," Feith said. From this perspective, the use of Palestine for earlier periods would be an act of "complicity" with that Roman punishment, he emphasized.

This thesis argues that the division of Palestine did not begin with the UN, but in 1921, when the United Kingdom separated the region of Transjordan (present-day Jordan) from the original League of Nations Mandate territory. Historically, leaders like Ariel Sharon have used this fact to defend the idea that "Jordan is the Palestinian state." With this argument, Sharon intended to block the creation of a new Arab state in the West Bank: if the Palestinians already had one east of the Jordan River, they shouldn't claim another in the west. Thus, any Palestinian territorial claim between the river and the sea is presented as illegitimate.

For her part, archaeologist and historian Josephine Quinn—the first woman to hold the Chair of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St. John's College—questions the idea that Palestinians are simply descendants of foreigners in this area of ​​the southern Levant. It's worth remembering that the Philistines were an Aegean people who settled on the coast of Canaan around the 12th century BC and gave their name to the region: Palestine etymologically derives from Philistia.

In an article published late last year in the London Review of BooksQuinn used a well-known archaeological maxim – "boats"They are not people"—to warn that finding Philistine-style pottery does not mean the original population was replaced by invaders.

For the author, this area of ​​the southern Levant has always been a melting pot where the local inhabitants (the Canaanites) lived and mixed with the newcomers. "It is not the result of human presence, but rather the fruit of millennia of permanence in this land."

Half a century after the publication of Jonathan Dimbleby's book—a personal friend of King Charles III—the struggle of the Palestinians is no longer just for the right to the land, but for the right to appear on the maps of history.