Erasing the Past of Palestine to erase it is Future: the two-state solution.
Erasing the Past of Palestine to earse it is Future: the two-state solution.
For years, I’ve watched a quiet war unfold — not on borders or battlefields, but in language, museums, classrooms, and maps. It is a war over terminology, over who gets to define history, and ultimately over who gets to exist in the future. What is happening to Palestinian history today is not accidental. It is a deliberate, long-term strategy to erase people by erasing their story.
The British Museum’s recent changes to its Middle East galleries are only one example, but they reveal a much larger pattern. When institutions rewrite labels, remove panels, or shift terminology, they are not simply “updating” language. They are shaping how millions of visitors — especially children — will understand the world. Museums know that most people never question what they read on a museum wall. If Palestine disappears from these spaces, it disappears from public memory.
This is how erasure works: quietly, professionally, and with the authority of “expertise.”
The Terminology War: A Battle Fought in Silence
I learned early on that terminology is never neutral. In the early 2000s, during a photography and journalism workshop funded by a Norwegian aid agency, we were asked whether we could “live next to Israelis in a two-state solution.” The question was framed as if Palestinians were the obstacle — as if we were being asked to coexist with our own killers. Even then, I understood that language shapes political imagination. If you control the terms, you control the debate.
Over the years, I watched the terminology war intensify:
The UN is quietly shifting definitions around Zionism
Schoolbooks removing the word “Palestine” from maps
Palestinian students punished for wearing the map on their uniforms
International politics departments teach a version of history where Palestinians vanish after 1948
NGOs promoting “neutral” language that erases the Nakba
Palestinians inside the 1948 territories call themselves “Arab” instead of Palestinian
These are not isolated incidents. They are coordinated forms of epistemic violence — violence against knowledge, memory, and identity.
How Terminology Prepares the Ground for the Two-State Narrative
The war on terminology is not only about erasing Palestinian identity — it is also about manufacturing consent for a political outcome. When institutions replace “Palestine” with fragmented terms like “Gaza,” “West Bank,” or “Arab communities,” they are training the public to see Palestinians as disconnected populations rather than one people with one homeland. Over time, this linguistic fragmentation makes the two-state framework feel natural, inevitable, even reasonable. People begin to accept a political solution not because it is just, but because the language around them has normalised it. If you change the terms long enough, you change what people believe is possible.
Maps Without Palestine: The Geography of Erasure
Erasure does not begin with bombs or bulldozers. It begins with maps.
This is a very good example of how erasure operates quietly inside Western scholarship, as found in Steve Tibble’s The Crusader Armies. The book uses a modern map labelled “Israel” as the base for discussing 12th-century history — a period in which the region was known as Filastin, Bilād al Shām, or the Kingdom of Jerusalem. This kind of anachronistic framing may appear technical, but it subtly rewrites the past and normalises a modern political narrative. It is precisely these small shifts — replacing historical names with modern ones — that pave the way for larger acts of erasure. And this is why I refuse to stay silent.
This is how erasure becomes normalised: first in maps, then in textbooks, then in consciousness.
Even global “neutral” maps participate in the same logic. They present the region through modern political borders that overwrite centuries of Palestinian presence. Children grow up seeing these maps on classroom walls and in their homes. They learn to recognise every country except the one that has been intentionally removed.
When a child cannot find their homeland on a map, the world is teaching them that their homeland does not exist.
This is not a mistake. It is a method — a slow, bureaucratic violence that prepares the ground for larger acts of historical rewriting. And it is the same logic that appears in museums, in academic texts, and in the British Museum’s quiet removal of Palestinian terminology.
Erasing Palestine Means Erasing My Rights
Erasing Palestine is not symbolic — it is an attack on my rights, my history, and my future. When you erase the word, you erase the people attached to it. You erase my right to return. You erase the massacres that forced us out. You erase the crime, and then you erase the victim. This is why terminology matters: because the moment the world accepts a map without Palestine, it becomes easier for them to accept a future without Palestinians.
Erasing a word is the first step toward erasing people.
Our right to return, our right to our past, and our right to name ourselves all depend on resisting this erasure with everything we have.
Universities and the Academic Sanitisation of the Nakba
Some of the most aggressive erasure happens in universities — the very places that claim to value critical thinking. At one British university, where I was an international politics student, a right-wing academic who openly supported Israeli state violence publicly called me “sewage” online after I gave a speech against racism during a protest. His hostility did not come out of nowhere; earlier, I had challenged the way history was being taught in class and confronted him for calling people holding the Palestinian flag “terrorists.”
Another lecturer dismissed my concerns about the absence of Palestinian narratives as nothing more than “academic framing.” A different professor and another lecturer apologised for every global massacre except the Nakba — the one that defines my people’s history.
This is not ignorance. It is a choice.
When academia erases the victims, it protects the perpetrators.
A Lifetime of Witnessing Erasure
My awareness of this war did not begin in a classroom. It began in childhood, when conflict forced us to leave our home and take refuge in my grandfather’s house — still in the same country, but already carrying the weight of displacement. My aunt’s storybooks became my refuge. Reading was how I survived instability. It was how I learned that history is not only written by the powerful; it is also rewritten by them.
In the mid-1990s, a Lebanese school referred to me as a “foreigner.” The irony was impossible to ignore. I, a Palestinian born in the region, was labelled foreign, while the real foreigners — the Western powers who carved up our lands and continue to shape our fate — were treated as neutral authorities. Those who arrived with borders, mandates, and colonial ambitions were never called outsiders. But we, the people of the land, were.
This is how erasure works: first through language, then through repetition, until people begin to accept it as normal.
And this is the danger. When bad news is repeated long enough, when injustice becomes routine, societies begin to adjust. What should shock becomes familiar. What should be rejected becomes tolerated. Eventually, toleration becomes accepted.
But not by me.
Others may grow numb to the erasure of Palestine, but I refuse. Even after receiving dozens of death threats, even after escaping violence more than once, I am still here. I am still speaking. I am still challenging the narrative. Survival has never made me silent — it has made me louder.
Erasure only succeeds when people stop resisting. And I am not going anywhere.
Why Erasure Matters: The Future Is the Target
People often think erasure is about the present. It isn’t. It’s about the future.
If you erase the past, you can manufacture a future where:
Palestine never existed
Palestinians are not a people
Zionism is not a colonial project
The Nakba is not a crime
Resistance is not legitimate
And the next generation accepts these lies as “common sense”
This is why institutions invest so heavily in controlling narratives. They know that younger generations are overwhelmed, distracted, and often disconnected from historical reading. They know that if they fill that vacuum with curated narratives, those narratives will become truth.
Erasure is not only about what is removed. It is about what is inserted in its place.
The British Museum Is Not an Exception — It Is a Warning
When the British Museum alters terminology or removes historical context, it is participating in a global pattern of narrative control. Museums are not neutral. They are political actors. They decide:
Which histories are preserved
which are softened
which are reframed
and which are erased
If Palestine disappears from these spaces, it disappears from the world’s imagination.
And imagination is where nations live or die.
Resisting Erasure: Memory as an Act of Defiance
The terminology war is not just a linguistic battle. It is a struggle for existence. Every time we insist on naming Palestine, on teaching our children the truth, on challenging distorted narratives, we are resisting erasure.
Our memory is our survival.
The British Museum may control its galleries, universities may control their syllabi, and NGOs may control their language — but they cannot control our voices.
We are still here. We remember. And we refuse to disappear.
Because my campaign, Erasing a Word Erases a People, is being pushed aside — even by people who claim to stand with Palestine. I need you to understand why I’m fighting for this, and why it matters so much.
There is a zionist project to replace “Palestine” with “Gaza” and “West Bank.”
A project to push a narrative that denies our right of return.
A project to slowly, quietly declare that Palestine no longer exists.
And when they erase Palestine from museums, they do it with intention.
So that future generations — people who never heard our story — will walk in and find nothing.
So they will believe we never existed.
This is why my campaign matters, and this is why I’m asking you to share it, because erasing a word is the first step to erasing a people.
If you believe in truth, if you believe in justice, stand with this campaign.
Stand with Palestine!
Taghrid Al-Mawed. Writing from Wales, but with my soul in Palestine.
Share widely — but please credit my writing
