Last December, a pro-Israel lobby group, UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), celebrated another apparent victory. It describes its mission as contributing “generally as lawyers to creating a supportive climate of opinion in the United Kingdom towards Israel”. In practice, this has meant lawfare, directed not only at pro-Palestinian activism, but at the public existence of Palestinian identity itself.

The offence this time? The Open University’s use of the term “ancient Palestine” to describe the birthplace of the Virgin Mary, which UKLFI argued was “historically inaccurate”. They argued it risked erasing “Jewish historical identity”, potentially breaching the Equality Act 2010 by creating “a hostile or offensive learning environment for Jewish and Israeli students”.

The OU’s Palestine Solidarity Group responded with a freedom of information request to see how their institution had handled the complaint. The reply from the OU was clear. “Ancient Palestine” was “academically appropriate”. The fifth-century BC Greek historian Herodotus used the term Palestine to describe a region broader than that acknowledged by UKLFI. While the lobby group insisted Mary was born in the “predominantly Jewish region” of Galilee, the university noted that there is no academic consensus that Mary existed at all, still less where she was born.

Academics did not “want the use of the term to imply or be read as a comment on the conflict between Israel and Palestine”, it added. In response to the UKLFI complaint, staff accepted that “the term is now problematic in a way that, perhaps, it was not when the materials were written in 2018”.

And so, despite affirming the term’s historical accuracy, the OU agreed to “not use the term ‘ancient Palestine’ in any future course materials”, and to “explain and contextualise its use in existing materials for current learners”. Last month, staff received an internal bulletin confirming the university had “agreed to change references to ‘Ancient Palestine’”, complete with a link to the UKLFI’s triumphant press release : “Open University agrees to change use of ‘ancient Palestine’ following UKLFI intervention.”

Enter the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, which imposes a duty on universities to secure lawful freedom of speech, even where that speech “may be offensive or hurtful to some”.

When the Palestine Solidarity Group argued that censoring an academically defensible term on the grounds that it was politically “problematic” violated the 2023 legislation, the vice-chancellor circulated a clarifying note: the university stood by academic freedom. The school would continue using the term, albeit with “an additional contextual note to support students’ understanding of differing perspectives”.

This is the real crisis of free speech in the west. The target is not just protest, but a people. Israel seeks to erase Palestinians as a society. First, they are destroyed in the present. Then they are deleted from the past.

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Courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd.