The British Museum is accused of removing the term "Palestine" from its exhibitions under pressure from a pro-Israeli group. In reality, only certain panels on Antiquity have been modified, for reasons of neutrality but also historical reasons, which is validated by several historians. The museum says it began making the changes last year, before the pro-Israel group's demands.

Published on: 02/19/2026 - 7:37 p.m. Modified on: 02/20/2026 - 11:17 a.m.

Controversy surrounding the famous British museum: since mid-February, several media outlets have relayed the idea that the British Museum had removed the term "Palestine" from its exhibitions.

"The name 'Palestine' has been removed from all the windows of the British Museum", for example published the French media AJ+ from the Qatari media Al Jazeera, in a Facebook publication on February 16. Likewise, the Palestine Media Agency, which claims that the British museum removed this word “from its exhibitions following pressure from a pro-Israeli group”.

Online, several English-speaking and French-speaking accounts also report the information: the Pure TV+ account, already pinned by our editorial team for misleading publications, for example declared to its 200,000 subscribers on Facebook that the British Museum had decided "under pressure from a pro-Israeli group" to "remove all mentions of 'Palestine' in its exhibitions".

The term "Palestine" still used by the British Museum

In fact, the term "Palestine" is still very much present in several exhibitions at the British Museum, as the museum itself stated in a short press release published on February 16: "It has been reported that the British Museum has removed the term 'Palestine' from its exhibitions. This is simply false. We continue to use the term 'Palestine' in a range of galleries, both contemporary and historical."

Contacted by our editorial staff, the British museum, famous in particular for its antique collections, indicates that it still uses the term Palestine, both according to "the UN terminology on maps which indicate modern borders, for example Gaza, West Bank, Israel, Jordan", but also in "reference to the term 'Palestinian' as a cultural or ethnographic identifier when appropriate".

The museum has nevertheless modified "certain labels and maps" concerning the period of Antiquity, for reasons described as historical. As explained to our editorial staff, for example, he now chooses to use "terms such as 'Canaan', which is more relevant for the southern Levant at the end of the second millennium BC". The British Museum clarified to our editorial staff that these changes were made "last year", but that the terms Palestine and Palestinians were still used, for example in room 57 of the museum dedicated to the "Ancient Levant" - a room accessible on Google Maps here.

Pro-Israeli pressure refuted by the museum

Those who accuse the museum of erasing Palestinian memory, however, consider that this change was driven by pressure from pro-Israeli actors. At the origin of these accusations: an article published on February 14 by the British media The Telegraph, indicating that the British Museum made these changes following complaints from a collective of pro-Israeli British lawyers concerning the anachronistic use of the term in some of the rooms on ancient history.

This collective called UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), known for its campaigns in support of Israel, indicated that it had sent a letter to the museum's management to criticize the fact that "several maps and descriptions retroactively applied the term 'Palestine' to periods when no entity of that name existed, thus risking obscuring the history of Israel and the Jewish people." The collective told France 24 that the letter was sent to the museum on February 6.

On February 14, the collective itself published an article on its site welcoming the change made by the museum, quoting a museum spokesperson who admitted to the organization that "the historical use of the term Palestine [...] was no longer relevant in certain circumstances."

When asked about this, the museum states that the decision to modify these signs was made independently and was not linked to the letter sent by UKLFI. According to a museum spokesperson interviewed by the Museum Journal site who returned to the matter, the museum curators had "started their review and update of the labeling more than a year ago" on the basis in particular of surveys of the public, i.e. well before the sending of the letter addressed to the museum by UKLFI, on February 6, 2026,

Asked by our editorial staff to know if it could provide information to establish when the relabeling had started and whether it had started before sending the UKLFI letter, the British Museum did not respond to our requests on this point.

The director of the museum Nick Cullinan himself affirmed that the process of change had been thought out for a long time by the museum's curators and affirmed that he had "not seen" the letter from UKLFI, to the Scottish historian William Dalrymple who was originally very critical of the museum's decision and who shared his exchanges with the director on X on February 16.

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“Palestine”, “Canaan”: a “normal and legitimate” change of term?

The reason given by the museum, however, refers to an explanation linked to the current situation in Palestine: "While the term 'Palestine' was previously considered neutral for the region, it 'no longer has a neutral connotation and can be understood as referring to a political territory, which is why we use UN terminology,' the spokesperson told Museum Journal, adding that 'some signs date from a period before the current understanding of the term and are under review.'

On a historical level, the few changes communicated by the British Museum seem in any case to make sense in the eyes of four historians interviewed by our editorial staff, even if some also note that the use of the term Palestine was not incorrect either.

Concerning the use of the term "Canaan", judged by the museum "more relevant for the southern Levant at the end of the second millennium BC", none of the specialists have in fact noted a historical error. The historian and honorary director of studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) André Lemaire, for example, describes a "normal and legitimate" development. "[The term] Canaan is the term used by the texts of the time", he explains, specifying that "the geographical term of Palestine dates back to the designation made by [the Greek historian] Herodotus in the 5th century BC".

A point also supported by Thomas Römer, professor at the Collège de France, holder of the "Biblical Environments" chair: "Canaan is in fact a more appropriate term to designate the Levant (south) in the second millennium [before Jesus Christ, Editor's note]. Palestine in Greek form probably appears for the first time in Herodotus, to designate roughly the region of the Levant up to Phenicia".

All the historians interviewed nevertheless mention the presence in the region of the Philistines, the people who gave their name to Palestine, from the 12th century BC. For the historian specializing in the Levant in the first millennium BC, Françoise Briquel-Chatonnet, "the Philistines were indeed there at the end of the second millennium [BC, Editor's note] but only in the southwest quarter of the Southern Levant. If the British Museum withdrew the term 'Palestine' to designate the whole of the Southern Levant at this period, it is indeed historically correct. But we could have kept 'Palestine' in the geographical sense as we speak of the Chauvet cave in France even though France did not exist at that time.

The Telegraph article that sparked the controversy also mentions two examples of altered labels on two works from ancient Egypt for the period 1700 to 1500 BC, where the word Palestine did not yet exist and the Philistines had not yet settled in the region. A card mentioning “Palestinian origin” was for example replaced by “Canaanite origin”. Françoise Briquel-Chatonnet recalls, however, that "for a long time, the term Palestine was a term used geographically"; which “did not have the same connotation as today”. She also recalls that “until 1948, the Jews claimed the term Palestine”.

Felicity Cobbing, director of the Palestine Exploration Fund, which manages the scientific journal Palestine Exploration Quarterly, also indicates that the British Museum did not make a historical error in using the term "Canaan", but specifies that the term Palestine is also "correct to use in the context of the 2nd millennium [before Jesus Christ, Editor's note], because it is used by researchers to describe the region as a whole, whatever the period".

She also intends to reiterate that the term remains historically central to the region: "It's sort of a conversation that we need to have: what do we mean by the term 'Palestine'? Are we referring to modern Palestine with the 1967 borders, or are we considering the broader historical and geographical meaning of Palestine? The term 'Palestine' has been used intermittently throughout history. The term is not a historical exception. It is rooted in the nomenclature of the region."

Updated 20/2/2026: This article was modified following a response to our editorial staff from the UKLFI collective, who indicated that they sent the letter to the British Museum on February 6, 2026.

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