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By Ilan Pappe / The Electronic Intifada
The assertion by the British Museum that the name Palestine is no longer historically neutral is a travesty.
Amid broad outrage, the institution’s response has been evasive.
“It has been reported that the British Museum has removed the term Palestine from displays,” it said on 16 February.
“It is simply not true. We continue to use Palestine across a series of galleries, both contemporary and historic.”
The real question is whether the museum removed the term from any display, not whether it still uses it in other exhibits.
Indeed, a spokesperson appeared to confirm to The Guardian that the museum replaced the term Palestine with “Canaan” in at least one exhibit.
The British Museum did not respond to a request for further clarification from The Electronic Intifada.
Its decision – which will hopefully be reversed – reflects moral cowardice widespread in Britain since October 2023.
The museum’s action is also historically unsound and calls into question the academic standards of this once illustrious institution – albeit one whose collections are largely composed of artifacts plundered during the colonial period.
Moral cowardice
The decision does not emerge from new developments in archaeology, nor as a response to pleas from the academic community.
Rather, the museum appears to have bowed to pressure from UK Lawyers for Israel, one of Britain’s most aggressive lobby groups.
UKLFI works to suppress support for Palestinian rights and has escalated its campaign during Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This has prompted legal complaints that the group uses “vexatious and legally baseless” tactics aimed at suppressing solidarity with Palestine.
The group even attempted to get British-Palestinian surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah disbarred from medical practice due to his public advocacy for victims of the genocide. In January, a British medical tribunal dismissed the complaint as baseless.
UKLFI’s pressure on the museum is part of a broader effort to erase Palestinians from history and deny Palestine as a nation.
The museum will no doubt deny that fear of this aggressive lobby drove its decision.
Canaan is contentious
The notion that the term Canaan is somehow more accurate than Palestine does not hold water. The academic community still debates the historical boundaries of the land of Canaan.
There was no cartography 3,000 years ago, so maps are produced today according to either biblical sources or archaeological excavations.
For some, Canaan refers to a small part of the Palestine coast; for others, it stretches all the way to the Euphrates. Much depends on the extent to which scholars rely on the Old Testament – which Zionist archaeologists like to do – and how they understand archaeological evidence.
One ancient Egyptian source defines the boundaries at the time more precisely than others and refers to Canaan as an Egyptian province, or a border zone between Egypt and its regional rivals. One could argue it encompassed historical Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon, yet that does not preclude calling the country Palestine.
Similarly, the fact that the terms Bilad al-Sham or the Mutasarrifate of al-Quds – the province of Jerusalem – referred to Islamic and Ottoman administrative districts and political entities that either included or existed in parts of Palestine does not negate the term Palestine either.
Whoever engages with the term, as a scholar, a museum visitor, a curator or a member of the public, must decide whether Canaan was part of Palestine or encompassed Palestine.
The Encyclopedia Britannica acknowledges this ambiguity, asserting that Canaan is “variously defined in historical and biblical literature but always centered on the region of Palestine.”
Canaan is not a substitute for Palestine and using it without context will not do.
The term Canaan is also deeply political, as Mary Ellen Buck, one of the world’s experts on the topic, observes in her book, The Canaanites: Their History and Culture from Texts and Artifacts.
She writes: “Modern politicians of the Middle East leverage the term ‘Canaan’ and ‘Canaanites’ as part of their political discourse.”
And she brings illuminating examples of how Israeli politicians use the term Canaan to justify the colonization of the West Bank, while Palestinians use it to defy Israeli aggression.
The only alternative in English would be to refer to the region as “Eretz Israel” – something even progressive Israeli scholars would hesitate to do.
It was and will remain Palestine
In its letter to the British Museum, UK Lawyers for Israel claims that using the term Palestine in reference to what happened thousands of years ago risks “obscuring the history of Israel and the Jewish people.”
The lobby group regards Canaan, as most Zionists do, as synonymous with the kingdoms of Israel and Judea and subscribes to the mythology that the people living in those regions were Jewish and that the Zionists are their descendants.
There was no state of Israel and no Jewish people at the time. A Hebraic tribe existed alongside other groups that formed kingdoms such as Israel and Judea.
From the inception of the Zionist project, archaeologists collaborated with the movement and later the Israeli state in interpreting the Old Testament as a historical document. They reinterpreted names of these ancient tribal kingdoms, such as the kingdom of Israel, as the name of the country, not of a long-vanished tribal entity.
When Palestine was taken over by regional or foreign powers, it was repeatedly divided into administrative districts before the imperialist League of Nations handed it to Britain under the Mandate.
This is why, since the modern professionalization of archaeology and history, the academic community – including those employed by the British Museum – have used the term Palestine as a reference to the geographical place in which, over more than five millennia, people lived continuously until they were dispossessed by the Zionists and Israel in 1948.
They lived in ancient times under Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Hebraic, Greek and Roman rule. The religious affinities of the Indigenous people changed over time: many moved from paganism to the Hebraic religion. In the next phase, most converted first to Christianity and later to Islam. This all happened in Palestine and the heritage accumulated through the ages belongs to the people of Palestine.
Not every Israeli academic feels comfortable with Zionism’s propagandistic re-writing of history. But present-day Israel, led by a messianic, racist and genocidal political elite, is willing to persecute even liberal Israelis who challenge it – and its agents in the UK try to do the same to academics and institutions in Britain.
Succumbing to the demand to replace Palestine with Canaan is not only a capitulation to the Israel lobby but an alignment with Israel’s current leadership, for whom Canaan is the biblical land stretching from the sea, across historic Palestine, Jordan, South Lebanon and southern Syria.
The British Museum’s decision will only confirm for Zionists that the Empire remains fully on their side.
Lobby group undermines Zionism’s own claims
So, we can say to the British Museum: Defining “Canaan” as the geographical location of your items is at least as contentious as “Palestine” – but even more so, as now visitors will know that the new reference is born not from scholarship but from adopting the most extreme version of the Zionist narrative.
No doubt unintentionally, UKLFI’s letter notably undermines a key Zionist claim: The group asserts that applying the term Palestine for periods dating back thousands of years “erases historical changes and creates a false impression of continuity.”
Isn’t this precisely what Zionists have always tried to do, by claiming that Palestine was always and only a “Jewish” land?
Even Zionist scholarship that desperately tried – and failed – to prove there was a continuous Jewish presence, referred to the land as Palestine. Zionist congresses proudly sold products from the colonies in Palestine and asked Jews to visit Palestine and its ancient sites.
Indeed, in the early decades of Zionism, the movement’s leaders had no trouble with the name either. Avowedly Zionist institutions that were instrumental to colonizing Palestine and dispossessing its people, such as the Anglo-Palestine Company – later Israel’s Bank Leumi – and the Jewish Agency for Palestine – now the Jewish Agency for Israel – are notable examples.
The only way to research Israel academically or culturally is as a state in a long continuum of political entities – one that, as in the case of the kingdoms of Israel and Judea, or that of Herod, occupied only very short periods in the rich history of ancient, medieval and modern Palestine.
Whatever the future entity in Palestine will be – hopefully a genuine democracy for all – it will proudly recount in its textbooks and museums its history over thousands of years. Palestine existed then and it will continue to exist in the future.
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Ilan Pappe
Ilan Pappe is professor of history and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Israel on the Brink and numerous other books.