Why We Occupied the British Museum

On Sunday, activists occupied the British Museum to demand that it end its partnership with BP after Israel granted the energy firm gas exploration licenses off the coast of Gaza. Here, the activists write about why they occupied the museum.

Originally published by Jacobin on 15 February 2024.

Over the last four months, countless solidarity groups have emerged with different proposed strategies for the best way to target and disrupt British complicity in Israel’s settler-colonial project. We are acting from the imperial core, where militarization, global capital, and politics are heavily dependent on the world energy market. We have chosen to respond to the call from Palestinian workers, trade unions, and civil society groups for an international energy embargo on Israel as a renewed tactic to end Western imperialist backing of Israel’s colonial genocide.

Inspired by previous successful energy embargos, including the 1973 Arab energy embargo on countries that backed Israel, and Yemen’s recent humanitarian intervention in the Red Sea, we launched our “Energy Embargo for Palestine” campaign with three central aims:

• Put political pressure on British politicians to call for a cease-fire

• Threaten business interests by making energy markets volatile

• Disrupt imperialist militarization by blocking access to energy that fuels Israeli fighter jets, army tankers, military vehicles, and more

These aims inspired our occupation of the British Museum on Sunday afternoon alongside the Free Palestine Coalition, a network of grassroots activist groups including the Palestinian Youth Movement in Britain, Sisters Uncut, and Black Lives Matter UK. The action commenced at 12:30 p.m., as participants staged a sit-in, taking up space in the main foyer and chanted demands for the museum to drop its sponsorship from British Petroleum (BP). Protesters held banners that read “British Museum, drop BP!” We called for an end to the British Museum’s renewed ten-year partnership deal with BP and dropped leaflets from the stairs that detailed the gas licenses issued to BP off the coast of Gaza.