From Colonial Loot to Cultural Genocide at the British Museum

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From Colonial Loot to Cultural Genocide at the British Museum
Rachel Spence
8 minutes ago
The British museum secretly hosted a birthday party for the Israeli embassy earlier this month.
Israeli embassy event at the British Museum. Photo: X/@MooniTB
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Last week, London's British Museum inaugurated 'Ancient India', a new show exploring the origins of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain sacred art. It should have been a moment to celebrate this rich confluence of artistic expression. Instead, there were calls to boycott.
One guest, British-Indian actor and author Jassa Ahluwalia, published his refusal on Instagram. Behind his withdrawal, he wrote, lay the museum's 'repugnant' decision to host a birthday party for the Israeli embassy some days earlier.
Held in secret – despite the museum's claim to run itself in an 'open and honest way' – the event was leaked by an insider to the activist organisation Energy Embargo for Palestine. The group was already focused on the museum for taking funds from BP, the fossil-fuel giant preparing to explore for gas in offshore Israel.
The party celebrated the 77th anniversary of Israel's founding in 1948 – an event coinciding with the Nakba, in which Israeli forces expelled 7,50,000 Palestinians from their homes and land.
The evening was hosted by Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotovely, who has called the Nakba 'a very strong and very popular Arab lie'. The museum's interior walls were lit in the blue and white colours of the Israeli flag, while Zionist guests made gleeful posts on X. Attendees included Maria Eagle, UK Defence Procurement minister who made a speech lauding Royal Air Force 'surveillance flights' over Gaza 'in support of hostage rescue efforts'.
The British Museum is arguably the UK's premier cultural institution, home to around 8 million objects including Egypt's Rosetta Stone and India's Amaravati Marbles. It drew 6.5 million visitors last year alone.
In an interview last year, its director, Nicholas Cullinan, condemned 'divisive discussions around nationalism' and claimed the museum had 'a role to play in giving people another way of thinking about the interconnected world, to be curious about each other.'
How then could he have permitted his institution to welcome a country so steeped in ongoing violence against civilians? The museum defended itself by saying that the party was held on a 'commercial basis', unlike events that the museum 'actively hosts'. Yet given our collective awareness of the world's first live-streamed genocide, the British Museum's decision to sell itself to the country responsible for that horror is shocking.
However it is far from the only western museum complicit in Israel's aggression. Last month, FreeMuse released their annual report monitoring international cultural censorship. As usual, they spotlighted a handful of countries with particularly oppressive records. Less usually, this year two western democracies were on the list. The USA and Germany found themselves alongside long-time offenders such as Cuba, Afghanistan, Russia and Iran, due to multiple museums' policies of cancelling and censoring pro-Palestinian art.
As I write this piece, reports come in that the Whitney Museum in New York has cancelled a performance about Palestinian mourning after concerns about certain phrases used by one of the artists in a previous presentation. When cultural institutions cannot find the imagination to negotiate differences of language and viewpoint without resorting to cancellation it begs questions about their authenticity.
Powerful art blossoms out of the darkest dilemmas. It is rarely elegant, polished, without rough edges. When the world beyond the museum is wracked with violence and injustice, it is inevitable that much artistic expression will reflect that raw, cruel turbulence.
Our cultural spaces should be the places where our eyes are most open.
Yet around Palestine, institutional western culture has suffered a willful blocking of vision. The result is a quenching of culture's ethical spotlight; a silencing of art's moral song.
If they continue to erase the Palestinian experience, western museums will not only lose their reputation as flag-bearers of free expression, but also betray that their vaunted efforts to decolonise their collections and staff hierarchies were merely window dressing.
Today, a growing number of culture-makers from the Global Majority doubt the intentions of western institutions. 'The sad realisation that our inclusion had probably been a form of tokenism and that the wider fraternity I genuinely believed in probably existed only in my mind leaves a bitter taste,' said Shahidul Alam, a photographer from Bangladesh, who in late 2023 found a German biennial he was curating suddenly cancelled, after he showed support for the Palestinian cause.
Asked to comment on Israel's event at the British Museum, Alam replied, 'The museum's website states its aim is to provide a safe, welcoming environment for all children and adults at risk. By hosting a birthday party for Israel, the museum supported the selective erasure of humanity. Its prioritisation of profit over principle reveals its mercenary nature.'
Palestinians are the victim of Israeli settler colonialism. That brutal system is dependent on the military support of countries such as the US and the UK, whose own wealth was built by stealing land, enslaving people of colour and exploiting labour.
For the British Museum, colonialism is a particularly raw nerve. Much of its collection was acquired thanks to Britain's imperial conquests.
Today the museum is assailed by repatriation demands, most famously by the Greek government for its Parthenon Marbles. Thousands of Egyptians have called for the return of their Rosetta Stone, which arrived in London with the tag 'Captured in Egypt by the British Army'.
From colonial-era India, the museum acquired the Amaravati Marbles, 121 sculptures taken from an ancient Buddhist stupa in Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, by British civil servant Sir Walter Elliot in 1860. Calling for their return in 2016, writer Ruchika Sharma castigated Elliot for his reckless excavations, accusing him of the 'greatest robbery of all time'.
The museum says that an Act of Parliament prevents it from returning items. However, British Museum director Nicolas Cullinan has said he has no intention of lobbying to change the act.
That attitude is in keeping with the heartlessness that welcomed Israel as Palestinian children starve. What is the point of conserving objects so impeccably if you collude with those who damage nature and community outside the museum walls?
If the British Museum cannot find sympathy for Palestine, it might spare a thought for their heritage. Ottoman historian Dr Yakoob Ahme d has spoken of a 'cultural genocide' as dozens of historic sites, including the Great Omari Mosque, which dates back to the early seventh century, were flattened. Echoing the looting of their British colonial forebears, Israeli troops have been accused of thieving more than 3,000 objects from Gaza's Al-Isra University, then wrecking the site to hide their crime.
The economic anthropologist Jason Hickel recently declared that 'Palestine is the rock on which the West will break itself.' How devastating if the region's great museums, who claim to foster cultural dialogue and harmony, help to fulfil his prophecy.
Rachel Spence is a poet and arts writer. Her latest book is Venice Unclocked (2022, Ivory Press). Her work has appeared in the Financial Times, Hyperallergic and The Art Newspaper.
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