Over 200 artists and cultural groups are urging the British Museum to “stop erasing Palestine” after the institution altered some wall texts in its Middle East Galleries in the wake of pressure from a pro-Israel group.
A letter addressed to the museum’s board of trustees and signed by musician and visual artist Brian Eno, among others, also criticizes the museum’s previous connections to the Israeli embassy and the oil company British Petroleum (BP), which is accused of profiting from Israel’s crimes against humanity in Gaza.
While the London museum has denied reports that it removed “Palestine” from its galleries, the group UK Lawyers for Israel publicly claimed that their advocacy led the institution to alter display texts. In one such instance, the group said, the museum replaced “Palestinian descent” with “Canaanite descent” in its Egypt galleries after the organization requested a review of terms related to Israel.
Last summer, UK law groups accused the pro-Israel organization of “vexatious and legally baseless correspondence aimed at silencing and intimidating Palestine solidarity efforts.”
The open letter, first reported by Novara, described the alleged label change as part of a “broader erasure of Palestine as a term, a place, a people and a historical reality” and accuses the museum of complicity in genocide. Artists and Culture Workers London, Jewish Artists for Palestine, and Archaeologists Against Apartheid are among the group signatories.
In a statement to Hyperallergic last month, the British Museum acknowledged that “some labels and maps in the Middle East galleries have been amended to show ancient cultural regions,” which the institution claimed was “more relevant for the southern Levant in the later second millennium BC[E].”
After news of the display alterations broke, the Palestinian Forum in Britain posted an image showing a wall text at the museum describing the Levant region as comprised of “Jordan, Israel, Gaza, West Bank, and western Syria,” but committing the use of the term Palestine.
“Recent events also underscore a fundamental issue,” the new open letter reads, “that Palestinians never consented to the looting and removal of their material heritage, with the Museum holding thousands of stolen Palestinian artifacts in its archives, some of which are displayed in the Museum today.”
The British Museum has not yet responded to Hyperallergic’s request for comment on the open letter.
Signatories issued a list of demands, including that the museum commission an expert review of labels describing historic Palestinian artifacts and apologize for hosting a private gala for the Israeli embassy last summer, which celebrated the state’s founding.
“It is against this backdrop that we call on the Museum to finally end the support it has shown to the Israeli government and those profiting from its genocide in Palestine, and beginning the process of repairing the immense harm done to Palestinians by British colonialism,” the letter concludes.
Eno, one of the letter’s most well-known signatories, is a prominent figure of the pro-Palestine movement.
This month, the artist and musician also committed to selling an artwork, “Seeing Through to Sky” (2025), in an upcoming auction to raise money for Palestinian humanitarian aid organizations. The works by Eno and others, including Nan Goldin and Es Devlin, will be shown in a public exhibition at Hope 93 Gallery in London later this month.
