Words For A Land With Too Much History

In 1979, I stepped off a plane into a place I wasn't allowed to name. My art school buddy grabbed my arm before customs. 'Three words you can never say here: Palestine. Yasser Arafat. And cus amak.' I knew the last one meant your mother's c*nt. But the first two? Just a place and a person. 'What do we call it then?" "The Holy Land."

Forty-six years later, the British Museum is playing the same game.

They have scrubbed the word Palestine from exhibits about people who lived 3,500 years ago. Changed Palestinian descent to Canaanite descent. Not because the archaeology changed. Because UK Lawyers for Israel wrote them a strongly worded letter.

I know something about strongly worded letters. I've spent over forty years in advertising. We called it the 'art of persuasion'. Politicians call it 'communications'. Orwell called it what it is: controlling the language to control the thought. And if you can make a word unsayable - even for people who've been dead for 3,500 years - you can make the people who use it invisible.

Here's how you erase a people without anyone noticing. First, you control the language. Make their name unsayable. Not through law - too obvious. Through pressure. Through complaints. Through making institutions nervous. The British Museum didn't ban Palestine. They just decided it wasn't historically meaningful. For 1700 BCE. That's 500 years before the kingdoms of Israel and Judah existed. But apparently using Palestine to describe people from that period erases those kingdoms.

Let me translate that from propaganda into English: We're erasing a word from 1700 BCE to protect the narrative about 1000 BCE.

Then you rewrite the past to control the present. If you can control what museums say about ancient history, you control what people believe about modern politics. If Palestine never existed - not even as a geographic term for the region - then Palestinians never existed. They're just Arabs who wandered in recently and can wander out again. Except the word Palestine has been used for 2,500 years. It's in Herodotus. It's in Roman records. It's in Byzantine texts. It's in Ottoman archives. It's in the British Mandate. It's been the name of that bit of land for longer than England has been called England. But if a museum changes a label, most people won't notice. They'll just absorb the new information: Oh, they were Canaanites, not Palestinians.

When challenged, don't defend the erasure. Make it about something else. Make it about accuracy. Make it about academic standards. Make it about antisemitism. Anything except what it actually is: political pressure successfully applied to cultural institutions. The British Museum didn't wake up one morning and think 'you know what, we've been using the wrong term for Bronze Age peoples'. They got a letter from an advocacy group with a documented pattern of using legal threats to suppress Palestinian history. And they caved.

I've spent my career understanding how words work. How they shape perception. How changing what you call something changes how people feel about it. 'Ethnic cleansing' sounds clinical. 'Forced displacement' sounds bureaucratic. 'They had to leave their homes at gunpoint' sounds like what it is. 'Terrorists' versus 'freedom fighters'. 'Settlements' versus 'colonies'. 'Conflict' versus 'occupation'. Every word is a choice. Every choice shapes the narrative. And 'Palestine' versus 'Canaan' is the same game.

Canaan is safely biblical. Ancient. Gone. No one's advocating for Canaanite rights. Using Canaan makes the region feel like ancient history with no connection to present politics. Palestine is modern. Political. Contested. Using Palestine implies continuity. Implies people have been there a long time. Implies claims that complicate the story we're supposed to accept. So they changed it. And most people won't even notice.

But here's an irony I first learned about from research published by the British Museum themselves. The people the British Museum is now renaming? The Hyksos. Foreign Semitic rulers who controlled northern Egypt from about 1650-1550 BCE. I've spent the last year studying everything I could find about them - archaeological reports, ancient historians, biblical scholars - trying to understand why this particular label change matters so much. Their capital was Avaris. Say it out loud. Avaris. Now say it with a Middle Eastern accent, the way it would have been pronounced 3,500 years ago. Avaris. Ivrit. Hebrew.

But we're not talking about Semitics here. We're talking about semantics.

I'm not saying the Hyksos were the ancient Israelites. Scholars have been arguing about that for centuries. Some say yes. Some say no. Some say maybe there's a connection but it's complicated. The Egyptian historian Manetho said they were expelled from Egypt and went on to found Jerusalem. Josephus said they were his people. Modern archaeology has found... let's just say some very interesting things at the ruins of Avaris, including a statue of a man in a technicolored coat. But that's not what this essay is about.

This is about what we call things. And who decides.

The spoken word lasts longer than the written word. Stories get edited. Names get changed. Museums change their labels. But people keep saying the old names, passing them down, remembering. You can change what's written on a museum label. You can't change what's been spoken for 3,500 years.

So what do we call it? I'm calling it the Holy Land. Because it's the one name that belongs to everyone. Eretz HaKodesh in Hebrew. Al-Ard Al-Muqaddasah in Arabic. Terra Sancta in Latin. Four Abrahamic faiths - Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the Bahá'í Faith - all call it holy. All claim it as sacred. Three have bled for it. All have buried their dead there.

When I couldn't say Palestine in 1979, the Holy Land was the term that got me through checkpoints without harassment. It was the neutral ground. The name no one could object to because it honoured everyone. The Holy Land doesn't erase Israel. Doesn't erase Palestine. Doesn't erase the Canaanites or the Philistines or the Romans or the Ottomans or any of the dozens of peoples who've lived there, died there, and left their names carved in stone or whispered in stories. It just says: this land is bigger than any one claim. This land is sacred to more than one people. This land has held more history than any museum label can contain.

I've spent the last year building The 7th Tribe - our name respects the hidden 13th tribe of Israel, the tribe of Jacob's seventh-born, his only daughter.

We call ourselves a matriarchy. Not to replace the patriarchy. To balance it. Here's the thing about matriarchy - Western historians and anthropologists will tell you there's no evidence it ever existed. No matriarchal societies in recorded history, they say. Except they mean their recorded history. The Mosuo in China. The Minangkabau in Indonesia. The Khasi in India. Matriarchal societies exist right now, today. But Western scholars spent centuries insisting they were impossible, whilst the people living in them got on with it. The patriarchy made sure we had a word for the thing they claimed never happened, just so they could keep telling us it was impossible in our culture. Well, we're making it possible. And the first rule of the matriarchy is: we don't let anyone control our language.

When UK Lawyers for Israel pressures a museum to remove a 2,500-year-old geographic term from exhibits about 3,500 years ago, we see it for what it is. Narrative control. Erasure by a thousand small changes. Making words unsayable so eventually they become unthinkable.

We've seen this before. Back in the time of the Hyksos everyone worshipped a god called El who had a wife, an equal - Asherah, the tree of life and queen of heaven. Never heard of her? Of course not. She was demonised and written out of the texts. And it's still happening today to a goddess continuously worshipped for millennia. Isis. The goddess of eternal life. In 2026 her name instils fear but for all the wrong reasons. Word games weaponised.

The British Museum can change their labels. They can call people from 1700 BCE whatever they want. They can cave to political pressure and pretend it's about accuracy. But they can't stop us calling it what it is. Palestine is a place. Has been for 2,500 years. The people who lived there in 1700 BCE were someone's ancestors. Maybe they were Canaanites. Maybe some were early Semitic peoples who'd later become Israelites. Maybe some were the ancestors of people who'd later be called Palestinians. Maybe all of the above.

History is messy. Peoples migrate and mix and split and merge. The same land holds layers of different peoples' stories. That's what makes it holy. And that's why I'm calling it the Holy Land. Because it honours all the stories. All the peoples. All the names spoken over thousands of years, even when someone tries to edit them out.

You can change museum labels. You can pressure institutions. You can make words politically dangerous to say. But you can't unhear what's been spoken. You can't unknow what's been known. You can't erase peoples by editing the past, no matter how many strongly worded letters you write.

The matriarchy remembers. We pass down stories. We speak the names that powerful people want forgotten. And we refuse to let anyone tell us which words we're allowed to say.

Call it Palestine. Call it Israel. Call it Canaan. Call it the Holy Land. Call it Avaris if you dare. Just don't let anyone tell you there's only one name, one story, one truth. There never has been. There never will be. The land has held too many peoples to belong to just one.

Editor's note, 17 February 2026:

This essay was written in response to an article in the Telegraph reporting that the British Museum had removed the word Palestine from its ancient Middle East displays following pressure from UK Lawyers for Israel.

Since publication, the British Museum director has called historian William Dalrymple to say the Telegraph story was a 'complete misrepresentation of the facts' and that the museum is 'not removing mention of Palestine.' Meanwhile, UKLFI has published the Museum's own statement confirming the labels were changed. And the changed labels exist. You can go and see them.

So. The Telegraph says one thing. The Museum says another. UKLFI says a third. The historians say the archaeology speaks for itself.

Orwell wrote: 'Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.'

Right now, four different versions of events are competing for the title of truth - a trusted British newspaper, a national institution, a legal advocacy group, and the academics whose careers depend on getting this right.

I'm not going to tell you which one to believe. I'm going to suggest that the fact we're having this argument - about labels on 3,500-year-old artefacts - tells you everything you need to know about who has something to gain from controlling the past.