A growing political firestorm has erupted in the United Kingdom over the primary sponsorship of the British Museum’s newly opened Bayeux Tapestry exhibition, after revelations that the Belarus-born billionaire backing the show with an estimated £5 million donation has ties to an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank. Opposition figures are now demanding the newly seated Labour government make good on its recent pledges to crack down on activity enabling illegal settlements by launching a formal probe into the sponsorship.
Zack Polanski, leader of the UK Green Party, was the first to publicly call for the investigation, following reporting by independent outlet Middle East Eye that exposed Igor Tulchinsky’s November 2025 unveiling of a therapeutic yurt at a new community resilience center in Efrat. The settlement, which is home to roughly 12,000 Israeli settlers, was constructed on land seized from four Palestinian villages and is currently subject to UK sanctions over its illegal status under international law.
Tulchinsky was named as the primary funder of the yurt project, which serves the Gush Etzion bloc of illegal Israeli settlements located 12 kilometers southeast of Jerusalem. He opened the facility alongside Efrat mayor Dovi Shefler, and publicly dedicated the space to “Israel’s brave warriors and their families,” according to on-the-ground reports.
This is not the first controversy over billionaire access and donations tied to pro-Israel causes at the British Museum in recent weeks. Just last month, The Guardian revealed the museum granted a private pre-opening view of the Bayeux Tapestry to Peter Thiel, the U.S. billionaire founder of Palantir, a defense technology firm that supplies cutting-edge artificial intelligence and data analysis tools to the Israeli military.
Polanski framed the call for investigation as a test of the Labour government’s commitment to its new policy on Israeli settlements. “If the Labour government wants to get beyond symbolism and new rhetoric, it must investigate whether this is a breach of the sanctions it announced this week,” he told Middle East Eye. He added that the revelation of Tulchinsky’s sponsorship follows close on the heels of the Thiel controversy, noting “we now learn of the sponsorship of another billionaire who’s been involved in supporting what the Labour government has itself now finally described as ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.”
Just days before the exhibition opened to the public on Thursday, UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband made a landmark policy announcement: his government formally recognizes the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory as illegal, and confirms that ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is underway in the occupied West Bank. Miliband announced sweeping new sanctions on all Israeli settlements, alongside a full ban on arms licenses and any exports that “materially contribute to the occupation.” He explicitly warned that any individual or entity funding or facilitating illegal settlements would face the full consequences of UK sanctions, stating “settlements are illegal. They should not be promoted in our country.”
Tulchinsky was not shy about his ties to Israel and support for its military, even before the revelations of his settlement project. In a March 2025 interview with the *Jerusalem Post*, he confirmed he has provided financial support to the Israeli military since the October 7 2023 Hamas attacks and the outbreak of the Gaza war, and noted he makes regular visits to the country. More recently, Middle East Eye revealed this week that Tulchinsky runs an Israel-based defense technology venture capital fund headed by a recently retired Israeli army commander who has championed the use of remote-controlled combat vehicles in Gaza. One international rights group has labeled these vehicles a “direct tool for committing genocide,” linking them to the destruction of entire residential neighborhoods and irreplaceable cultural heritage sites in Gaza and Lebanon.
Tulchinsky attended the exhibition’s official opening reception last week alongside high-profile UK and French figures, including King Charles III, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer (corrected per original context: Andy Burnham as referenced in original) and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy. A portrait of Tulchinsky painted by prominent artist Jonathan Yeo is set to hang in the British Museum for the full run of the exhibition, with Yeo describing Tulchinsky as an extraordinary person and brilliant mind who was a privilege to paint.
Neither Downing Street, the Foreign Office, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the British Museum, nor Tulchinsky’s investment firm WorldQuant have issued formal responses to repeated requests for comment on the controversy. The DCMS noted that while the British Museum receives public funding through the department, it operates independently of government, and all sponsorship decisions are the responsibility of its board of trustees. The Efrat Development Foundation has confirmed Tulchinsky is a donor to the community center project, but said he contributed through an unnamed third-party organization and declined to share further details about the scope or nature of his support.
The sponsorship controversy adds to a series of ongoing challenges facing the British Museum, which has already faced calls from cross-party MPs for an investigation into the alleged removal of references to Palestine from several of its public galleries. Kim Johnson, a Labour MP and leading parliamentary campaigner for stronger UK action on Israeli violations of international law, warned that a clear pattern of problematic decision-making is emerging at the institution. “First, Palestine is scrubbed from displays following political pressure. Now we learn the British Museum has accepted significant funding from someone reported to have funded a settlement project in the illegally occupied West Bank,” Johnson said. “The British Museum should be preserving history, not allowing political interests or money to shape whose history is told – or whose actions are legitimised. Is this really who our national cultural institutions should be taking money from?”
In response to earlier claims about removed references to Palestine, the British Museum released a statement denying any intentional removal, noting that it continues to use the term Palestine across a range of historic and contemporary gallery displays. To date, no further response has been issued to address the latest calls for an investigation into Tulchinsky’s sponsorship.