The (British Museum) in London has responded to the claims of a pro-Israel group, and has withdrawn the term from a large part of the samples and explanations contained in its room dedicated to the Near East and the Levant, which covers the period between 2000 and 300 BC
UK Lawyers For Israel (UK Lawyers for the Defense of Israel) sent a letter to the museum director, protesting the impression of “historical continuity” with the use of the term.
“By granting a single name – Palestine – retrospectively to the entire region throughout , it eliminates historical changes and creates a false impression of continuity,” the protest letter stated. “In this way, the aggravating effect of eliminating the kingdoms of Israel and Judea, which emerged around 1000 BC, is caused, and thus wrongly placing the origin of the Israelites and the Jewish people in Palestine,” they add.
The museum has opened a consultation period to address the complaint, but the immediate effect has been the elimination of the term in several of its posters and texts in the room, in which the Levantine Mediterranean coast was called Palestine, and some of its inhabitants described as “Palestinian descendants.”
The museum has now assured, through a spokesperson, that the term was not “significant” when it came to describing ancient cultural regions. Some changes, he noted, have been the result of a process of research and consultation with visitors.
The terminology, in any case, is open to discussion. Texts from 1500 BC refer to the eastern Mediterranean as the Land of Canaan. The Kingdom of Israel appears in an Egyptian writing from around 1200 BC And the historian Herodotus speaks of Palestine in a text from 500 BC
The pro-Israel lawyers association has been quick to take credit for the success of the changes, with a statement in which it expressed its gratitude to the museum for its willingness “to correct incorrect terminology.”
“Museums play a vital role in public education, and it is essential that their descriptions reflect history accurately and neutrally. The changes made are an important step in ensuring that visitors gain an accurate understanding of what the Middle East was like,” they wrote.
The paradoxical thing about the museum’s decision, which will still take months to do a complete review of all the references in its rooms, is that its managers recognize that the term Palestine has been used normally since the 19th century by academics who study the regions of the Near East and the Middle East to refer to the southern Mediterranean Levant. However, the museum now recognizes that the term has lost its historical neutrality and has become a political reference loaded with symbolism.
A few hours after the media reported on the changes adopted by the museum, thousands of people have already signed a petition on the website to have the decision reversed.
“If the British Museum were sincerely concerned about modern etymology, as a matter of consistency it should carry out similar scrutiny of terms such as British, which is still a relatively modern political construct,” the petition denounces. “This selective elimination rather suggests a lack of consistency in terms of museum conservation, and leads to the suspicion that the historical presentation has been influenced by political pressures,” the text says.
The signatories demand that the term Palestine be restored from all signs where it has been removed; that the museum provide more transparency when explaining its decisions; that the measures adopted respond to historical rigor and not to political pressures; and that the museum is “on par with a publicly funded institution in presenting history with integrity.”
“Deleting a word erases a people. History includes Palestine, and the British museum must reflect that reality,” concludes a petition in which there is no shortage of references to the texts of the historian Herodotus, to the administrative records of the Roman Empire regarding “Syrian Palestine”; to the appearances of the term in Byzantine, Islamic, Crusader texts or on maps of the Middle Ages. “It even appears in the Othello by Shakespeare, a masterpiece of British culture. “If the term is acceptable in Shakespeare, it should not be erased from a national museum.”
