Has the British Museum really removed references to ‘Palestine’ from exhibits?

The latest scandal brewing about the British Museum centres on its choice to remove references to “Palestine” from the information panels on several displays, as first reported by several media outlets in mid-February. 

The story quickly sparked headlines around the world. 

“The name ‘Palestine’ was removed from all the exhibits in the British Museum,” reads a February 16 Facebook post shared by the French-language edition of AJ+, a publication of Qatari media outlet Al Jazeera. For its part, Agence Média Palestine reported that the British Museum removed references to Palestine “from its exhibits under pressure from a pro-Israel group”.

The social media accounts of several English and French language outlets were also quick to share the news. Pure TV+ – whose misleading posts we’ve reported on in the past – declared to its 200,000 Facebook followers that the British Museum decided "under pressure from a pro-Israeli group” to “delete all references to 'Palestine' from its exhibits".

Turns out, the British Museum is still using the term 'Palestine'

In reality, the British Museum still uses the term "Palestine" in a number of different exhibits, as the museum itself indicated in a short statement published on February 16: “It has been reported that the British Museum has removed the term Palestine from displays. It is simply not true. We continue to use Palestine across a series of galleries, both contemporary and historic.”

Our team contacted the British Museum, known for its collections of antiquities. The museum reiterated to our team that they are still using the term “Palestine”.

“We use the UN terminology on maps that show modern boundaries, for example, Gaza, West Bank, Israel, Jordan, and refer to ‘Palestinian’ as a cultural or ethnographic identifier where appropriate,” the museum said. 

The museum did say that they had modified “certain panels and maps” about ancient regions for what they say were primarily reasons of historical accuracy.

“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,” the British Museum said. 

The British Museum also explained to our team that these changes were undertaken “last year”, but that the terms Palestine and Palestinians were still being used in Gallery 57, for example, which is dedicated to "Ancient Levant". You can see the gallery on Google Maps by clicking here.

Museum refutes reports of pro-Israel pressure

Those who accuse the museum of erasing Palestinian history also believe that this change was undertaken after pressure from pro-Israel actors. The source of these accusations is an article published on February 14 by the British media outlet The Telegraph, which reported that the British Museum had undertaken these changes after complaints from UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLIF), a voluntary group of solicitors, who were concerned about the use of the term “Palestine” in displays covering ancient Egypt and the Levant. 

UKLFI, known for running various pro-Israel campaigns, said that it had sent a letter to the director of the British Museum complaining “that several maps and descriptions retroactively apply the term 'Palestine' to periods in which no such entity existed and risk obscuring the history of Israel and the Jewish people”.

UKLFI told our team that they had contacted the museum on February 6. 

UKLFI posted an article on its site on February 14, welcoming the change made by the museum. The article cited a museum spokesperson who said to the organisation that “the historic use of the term Palestine … is in some circumstances no longer meaningful”.

When asked, the British Museum said that the decision to modify the information panels had been taken independently and that it was not linked to the letter sent by UKLFI. 

A spokesperson for the British Museum said to the Museum Journal that the museum staff “began their review and update of the labelling over a year ago” in response to “audience testing”. Or, in other words, well before the museum received the letter sent by UKLFI on February 6, 2026. 

When we asked if the British Museum could provide proof of when the changes in the display panels first occurred, the museum didn’t respond. 

Museum director Nick Cullinan also said that museum staff had been thinking about these changes for some time and that he “hadn’t even seen” UKLFI’s letter, according to Scottish historian William Dalrymple, who posted details of his exchanges with Cullinan on X on February 16

From ‘Palestine’ to ‘Canaan’: what to make of this change?

However, the museum did acknowledge that the changes were in part made because of the current situation in Palestine. 

A museum spokesperson told the Museum Journal that while the term “Palestine” had previously been considered neutral for the region, for many people, the term “no longer holds a neutral designation and may be understood in reference to political territory, which is why we use UN terminology”. 

“Some of the BM's graphic panels date from the earlier period of the understanding of the term and these are being reviewed as part of plans for refurbishing these spaces,” added the spokesperson.

However, at least historically speaking, the changes enacted by the British Museum make a certain sense to the four historians who spoke to our team, though some pointed out that using the term Palestine wasn’t incorrect either. 

The historians also agreed with the museum’s statement that the term "Canaan" is more "relevant for the southern Levant in the later second millennium BC”. 

French scholar and historian André Lemaire, who is based at the École pratique des Hautes études (EPHE), described a “normal and legitimate evolution”. 

"[The term] Canaan is the term used by texts from the time period,” he said, adding that “the geographical term Palestine was first used in the 5th century BC by [Greek historian] Herodotus".

Thomas Römer, a professor at the Collège de France, agreed. 

"Canaan is a more appropriate term for describing the (southern) Levant in the second millennium [Editor’s note: BC]. The term 'Palestine' in its Greek form probably first appears in the writings of Herodotus to broadly describe the part of the Levant up to Phoenicia.” 

All of the historians mentioned that Philistines, the people who gave the land the name Palestine, were in the region from at least the 12th century BC. 

Françoise Briquel-Chatonnet is a historian who specialises in the Levant in the first millennium BC.  

"Philistines are indeed there at the end of the second millennium [Editor’s note: BC] but only in the southwest quarter of southern Levant. So the British Museum’s choice to stop using the term 'Palestine' to designate the whole of the southern Levant at this period is historically accurate. But we could have continued to use the term 'Palestine' in a geographic sense like we speak on the Chauvet Cave in France even though France didn’t exist back then [Editor’s note: when the famous cave paintings were being made].” 

The Telegraph article at the heart of the controversy also reported that references to Palestine were also removed from two information panels in another gallery dedicated to ancient Egypt between 1700 and 1500 BC, which was before the word Palestine was used and before the Philistines settled in the southern Levant. 

In this case, "of Palestinian origin” was changed to “of Canaanean origin”.  

“For a long time, the term Palestine was a term used for a geographic area,” Briquel-Chatonnet said, adding that it “didn’t have the same connotations that it has today”. 

“Until 1948, Jews used the term Palestine,” she also said. 

Felicity Cobbing, the director of the Palestine Exploration Fund, which runs the scientific journal Palestine Exploration Quarterly, also said that the British Museum had not made a historical error by referring to "Canaan", but added that the term “Palestine” is also correct when referring to the “second millennium [BC] because it is used by researchers to describe the region in its entirety in any time period”. 

She added that the term remains historically important for the region.

“It is, in some ways, a conversation we should have. What do we mean by the term Palestine? Are we referring to modern Palestine with its 1967 borders? Or are we considering the term 'Palestine' in a larger, historical and geographical sense? The term ‘Palestine’ has been used intermittently all throughout history. It’s not a historical exception, it’s anchored in the nomenclature of the region."

This article has been translated from the original in French by Brenna Daldorph.