Overview
- Curators replaced references such as “Palestinian descent” with “Canaanite descent” on a Hyksos-era panel and adjusted maps to use Canaan for the southern Levant in the later second millennium BCE.
- A museum representative said the updates were planned through audience research over the past year and were not triggered by a recent letter from UK Lawyers for Israel.
- UKLFI had argued the term “Palestine” was applied anachronistically in ancient contexts and welcomed the revisions as improving historical precision.
- The British Museum said it still uses UN-recognized terminology for modern boundaries and refers to “Palestinian” as a cultural or ethnographic identifier where appropriate.
- Backlash from scholars and campaigners continues, including a petition with more than 5,000 signatures accusing the institution of erasing Palestinian history, while legal groups maintain complaints about UKLFI’s tactics.