The British Museum handling of Palestine erasure is in bad faith
Demonstration outside the British Museum
Helio Figueiredo writes in The New Arab on 16 March 2026:
In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been surprised that it was so complicated to find out why the word “Palestine” was removed from some sections of the British Museum. The difficulty was there by design. After all, the only reason why we, the public, know it happened in the first place is that a newspaper article exposed the change and the museum in the process.
The Telegraph, a conservative and staunchly pro-Israeli British publication, reported on the erasure of “Palestine” in the first place. And they attributed the change to the lobbying efforts of UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), a pro-Zionist organisation that dedicates itself to the erasure of Palestine, as a concept, from public life in the UK.
Why did they reveal this? The change could have gone unnoticed and uncontroversial, but for a small group of specialists. If I were a gambler, I would bet on strategic cruelty, a weapon often wielded by UKLFI, who from observation, likes to cultivate an aura of invincibility to better serve as a deterrent for pro-Palestine advocacy.
The response from civil society, academics, politicians, pro-Palestine organisations, as well as employees and members of the British Museum was swift, vocal and outraged. This is an unsurprising reaction, coming as this does, on the backdrop of the genocide in Gaza – that is both physical and cultural – and the violence, destruction and appropriation of Palestinian land and historical sites by the Israeli government in the West Bank.