MORNING STAR ambassador Maxine Peake is among more than 200 cultural figures who have signed a letter urging the British Museum to reject “Palestine erasure.”

The museum recently removed the word “Palestine” from some of its displays after concerns were raised by UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLIF). The museum denies any link between the display changes and the organisation’s complaint.

Maps and information panels in the museum’s ancient Middle East galleries had referred to the eastern Mediterranean coast as Palestine, with some people described as being “of Palestinian descent.”

The museum said that the term had been used inaccurately and is no longer historically neutral after the lobby group claimed these references risked “obscuring the history of Israel and the Jewish people.”

According to UKLFI, the museum has since changed panels in its Egypt galleries to replace “Palestinian descent” with “Canaanite descent.”

Today, an open letter signed by actors Ms Peake, Juliet Stevenson and musician Brian Eno said that “genocide extends to the cultural and historical erasure of a people” and branded the museum’s actions an “act of historical revision and potential erasure.”

It also called out the museum’s “indefensible decision to host a private party for the Israeli embassy last year” as well as its continued partnership with BP, “a company that has profited from its supplying of fuel to the Israeli military.”

“The British Museum [must] avoid complicity in genocide, either through its representation of Palestinians and their history or by providing direct support to those that perpetrate or profit from that genocide,” said the letter co-ordinated by campaign group Culture Unstrained.

The letter was also signed by architects Jeremy Till and Sarah Wigglesworth, with Jewish Artists for Palestine, Archaeologists Against Apartheid and Artists & Culture Workers London, Holly Aylett, former representative for culture on the committee of the UK National Commission for Unesco, Palestine 36 film director Annemarie Jacir and University of Cologne museum and heritage studies professor Mirjam Brusius.

Archaeologists Against Apartheid said: “Archaeologists, historians, museum and heritage workers, more than anyone, have both an urgent responsibility and an unparalleled opportunity to stand up against Israel’s ongoing cultural erasure, ethnic cleansing and genocide, and to stand in solidarity with the Palestinians that zionists are trying to erase, from the past and the present.”

A spokesperson for Energy Embargo for Palestine said: “It is deplorable that the British Museum is revising the use of the term Palestine.”

The British Museum was contacted for comment.