Where is Palestine in the Anzacs’ Palestine Campaign? Israel and the Struggle for Indigeneity in Commemorative State Practice

Abstract

At the end of the second decade of the twenty first century, Israel has sought to align itself with a range of Indigenous struggles both to conceal the ongoing nature of settler-colonialism and to attempt to position the Zionist-state project as an indigenous one. This article examines one instance of this trend, in the recent commemorative events surrounding the centenary of the Palestine Campaign, a military campaign fought by Australian soldiers during World War I. The article argues that official Israeli commemoration of this campaign, and the recent foregrounding of the role of Aboriginal servicemen in it, is an example of Israel’s indigenous diplomacy, which aims to occlude Palestinian presence and history in their ancestral lands. It argues that this practice ultimately does not serve the purpose it is intended to fulfil, but merely delays the work of imagining a just future in Israel/Palestine.

Keywords:

• Anzacs
• Indigeneity
• Israel
• national narratives
• Palestine Campaign
• settler-colonialism
• World War I

The 2017 centennial of the Battle of Beersheba, a key action in the Palestine Campaign of World War I, was marked by a ceremonial reenactment involving some ‘two dozen reenactors of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps’ (Anzacs) (Staff 2017). The event comprised a series of anachronisms, including the performance of a Maori haka, and a color bearer holding the Israeli flag aloft into battle. Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull’s address at the commemoration signalled the symbolism at work: ‘Had the Ottoman rule in Palestine and Syria not been overthrown by the Australians and the New Zealanders, the Balfour Declaration would have been empty words’ (Turnbull 2017). Although a significant and successful campaign of World War I, until recently, it had bee ignored and largely fallen from national memory. This availed the centennial celebrations a fertile ground for the retrospective imposition of a teleology on the Campaign, as offered in Turnbull’s remarks, and a re-enactment better able to serve a diplomatic fostering of aligned national narratives between Israel and Australia. The event illustrates the elasticity of reenactment in appropriating ‘both the real and imagined past’ (Agnew 2004, 334). Moreover, in representing the battle within the matrix of Israel’s state formation, both the reenactment and Turnbull’s allusion to its role in offering substance to the promise of the Balfour Declaration, purported to make sense of the long-affirmed and historic connections between the two states. In its commemoration, the Battle of Beersheba was positioned as part of a linear progression toward Israel’s future statehood (Agnew 2004, 330; de Groot 2006, 396).

The centenary of the Battle of Beersheba also signalled a new development in Israeli-Australian relations, specifically in Israel’s fostering of relations with Australian Aboriginal communities. While this is not the first instance of Israel’s ‘indigenous diplomacy’ with First Nations people, either in Australia or elsewhere, it marked a particular instance of attempts to locate retroactively the Zionist-state project as an indigenous one. The ‘indigenous turn’ represented in Israel building connections to First Nations people as a way of locating a comparison with Jewish-Israeli identity has been intensified by a trend in scholarship to apprehend Israel in the framework of settler-colonialism. As with any national identity there are competing narratives in characterising the essence of a polity. Israel’s cultural aspiration in the second half of the twentieth century primarily was directed toward creating, and being understood, as a Europe below the 40^th parallel (Shammas 1987, 22–26); while the traditional Zionist reconstruction of the past, which draws on antiquity to assert a Jewish origin in land through a paradigm of ‘expulsion’ and ‘return’, did not foreground a claim of belonging through one of indigeneity (Zerubavel 1995, 13–17). However, as Edward Said (1992, 88) wrote,

Zionism was not only a reproduction of nineteenth-century European colonialism … [it] aimed to create a society that could never be anything but “native” … at the same time that it determined not to come to terms with the very natives it was replacing with new (but essentially European) “natives.”

It is precisely this matrix in which settlers are ‘forever indigenising’, which Lorenzo Veracini observes, rules out the possibility of being indigenous or ever becoming native (2015, 270).

In Israel, identity also has been coupled with the battle for legitimacy. Since the era of Israeli aerial bombardment of Gaza over the last decade, as Ali Abunimah notes, the battle for legitimacy has been recentered on the grounds of universal principles, human rights and equality – a ground increasingly firmly held by the Palestine solidarity movement (Abunimah 2011, 398). In this context, Jewish-Israeli claims to indigeneity are deployed as a strategy by which Palestinians are exiled anew, legally and rhetorically, from the land’s history. As Veracini observes, the inherent anxiety affecting settler societies sense of legitimacy goes to the heart of interpreting Zionist claims of ‘indigeneity’ which should be read against the narrative constellation of a promised land: ‘people that are promised land somewhere else constitute by definition a sociopolitial collective that is organised prior to its arrival, as good a definition of being exogenous as any’ (Veracini 2015, 270).

Scope and Method

This article investigates recent commemoration of the Palestine Campaign as an instance of the Israeli state project towards indigenization of the Israeli settler through indigenous diplomacy with Australian First Nations people. It examines how Israel actively has engaged in shaping commemorative practice of Australian military campaigns fought in historic Palestine during World War I and sought to create ties with Australian Aboriginal communities through commemorative events highlighting the role of Indigenous servicemen and sacrifice in this campaign while erasing Palestinian presence and history. The article argues that these efforts retrofit the Zionist-state project as an indigenous one, reengineering history and memory, through both association with and proximity to Indigenous peoples whose status as such is not contested.

The article considers how deploying the marker of indigeneity as one with moral authority has been an important component of an internationally facing image of Israel this century. What is paradoxical about this re-positioning of Jewish-Israeli identity is that the moral legitimacy inherent to Indigenous claims are enforced through the institutional violence of settler-states. It argues that this is because while Zionism claims an origin story in historic Palestine, indigeneity (as distinct to a naturalising claim to belonging, less vested in continuous connection to place, as implied in yalid) offers a kind of authenticity which otherwise has proved elusive (Monterescu and Handel 2019, 316). Prosecuting this identity is one method by which Israel has attempted ‘to close the file of 1948 without opening it in the first instance’, circumventing Israel’s responsibility to Palestinians by, paradoxically, usurping their identity (Zreik 2016, 361; Kauanui 2018). This trend has been noted in recent scholarship on the phenomenon of ‘indigenous’ wine making in Israel/Palestine and the concept of ‘terroir’ (Monterescu and Handel 2019, 313–327; McGonigle 2019, 7–12). According to Daniel Monterescu and Ariel Handel, indigenous wine politics in Israel/Palestine represent ‘another instrument of settler-colonialism, along with multiple other forms of cultural appropriation’ in which a self-professed ‘acquired indigeneity’—that subordinates Palestinian indigeneity in service of the Israeli quest for rooted identity—serves as a form of oppression (Monterescu and Handel 2019, 315, 323–324).

Thus, the case study presented is one instance of a broader strategy by Israel to disavow its characterisation as settler-colonial, which it has sought to refute through alternative images, including an indigenous one. It identifies an aspect of settler practices ‘that allow settler colonialism to operate materially and culturally’, and thus challenges the Zionist narrative (Sabbagh-Khoury 2022, 70). While Raef Zreik (2016, 358–359) has noted the sophistication of the Zionist settler-colonial project located in representational dualities, and the difference of Jewish settlers to others, such as ‘the Zionist self-image of coming back home to the ancient Promised land’, Areej Sabbagh-Khoury (2022, 61) reminds us that Zionist claims of return ‘do not detract from the settler colonial nature of the project’ since the problem is not afterall, ‘return’, but the fact of settlement in a homeland inhabited then as now by Palestinians. As Patrick Wolfe (2006, 388) has argued, it is not the intention but the structure that gives settler-colonialism its character and in particular, that settler societies are ones that destroy ‘in order to replace’. J. Kēhualuani Kauanui (2018) extends this theorization as a rationale not merely vested in eliminating the native, but which seeks to eliminate the native as native. It is argued that a chief motivation in this disavowal is therefore the elusive aspiration of Jewish-Israeli society to ‘a homely space’ as conceptualized by Ghassan Hage (2010, 114), and the desire to embed the identity of a settler population, both practically and psychically in the land. Moreover this ‘indigenous turn’ offers an implicit acknowledgement that neither force nor power can resolve Israel’s underlying anxiety about identity and legitimacy (Zreik 2016, 361). Through examining Israel-Australia relations, and in particular Israel’s fostering of connections with both the Australian state and Australian First Nations people, I highlight the uneasy contradictions of this form of state identification in the twenty first century.

Narrative Appropriation in State Commemoration of the Battle of Beersheba

Israel has invested in strengthening relations with Australia though centenaries marking World War I, and particularly the Palestine Campaign, in which Anzacs had a significant role. An early instance of this was the joint release by Australia Post and the Israel Postal Company of a commemorative stamp issue in May 2013 marking the Battle of Beersheba (1917). The press release stated that the battle was one of Australia’s greatest but least known military triumphs while a leaflet accompanying the stamps claimed this battle set in motion ‘a chain of events which eventually culminated in the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948’ (Vlazna 2013). The stamp issue reinforced identification between the states at an institutional level, affirming and corroborating each state’s founding myths and origin stories (Sahhar 2015a, 175–190). In the Australian case, the Anzac campaign of World War I has obscured an historical record of the Frontier Wars, replacing in-country violence with the fiction that no wars have been fought on Australian soil which as Henry Reynolds has argued, has been ‘by far the most successful campaign in the culture wars in part because it has not been seen for what it actually was’ (Beaumont and Cadzow 2018, 4; Reynolds 2020, 226). In the Israeli case, Anzac commemoration forges a fictional connection between the contemporary state and the heritage of the Anzacs, despite the historical inaccuracy implicit in that claim.

At the time of the stamps release, Israel’s Ambassador to Australia, Yuval Rotem described the symbolic value of the issue in affirming this relationship: ‘despite great geographical distance between our two nations, we operate on the same foundation of values. I am proud of all that our countries have achieved together’ (Rotem 2013). Here, the joint-stamp issue works to highlight ‘mythologies of conquest’ common to Israel and Australia, remarkably uniform narratives that can be reproduced in any settler-colonial context where a state’s aim is to eradicate anxiety about its originary legitimacy (Finkelstein 2003, 89). Rotam’s comments enunciate this commonality and identify the basis of identification: ‘we both inhabit ancient lands and yet are relatively young nations … We know the true value of water and have made our deserts flourish’ (Rotem 2013). Making the desert bloom is but one illustration of parallel narrative strategies common to both states.

Although Beersheba was described the day after the Battle as an ‘ancient Palestine city, having much strategic value’ (The New York Times 1917), the stamp-images are intended to convey the emptiness of the landscape, an evocation which finds resonance in settler-states’ mythologies of conquest. Yet in depicting Beersheba’s famous railway bridge, built in 1915, the $2.60 stamp refers to an entirely different reality of the landscape. The bridge stands as a visible trace of the presence, where we are taught there was none, of twentieth century Palestine. In contrast, the only reference to Israel, apart from the denotation of the joint issue, is the choice of blue (recalling the colour of the Israeli flag), in which Hebrew lettering states the subject of the image. It would be difficult to insert a greater connection into the stamps’ imagery, because the connection is an ideological coupling of the nations actualized in the stamps themselves rather than in the history they purportedly recoup. Similarly, Prime Minister Turnbull’s centenary speech (2017) only can portend, in the rhetorical frame of national-narrative making, the arrival of Israel—referencing the idea that the Battle of Beersheba was part of a campaign ‘which made history, which fulfilled history’.

© Australian Postal Corporation 2013

In tethering the celebration of Australian military history to Israeli State commemoration, the stamps serve to emphasise the hegemony of nationalist histories as a central tenet of identity in settler-colonial states. Both Australia and Israel have sought to entrench the role of the military into the fabric of national values and everyday life, obscuring other possible narratives that threaten their legitimacy (Damousi 2010, 97). The revival of the Battle of Beersheba in both Australian and Israeli memory signals the complicity of settler-colonial states in corroborating the national fictions of each other. This enables ongoing practices of obscuration and repression, through present day violence—whether administrative or militaristic in nature—of the Indigenous population, whose identities serve as a perpetually intolerable reminder of the colonizer’s crime (Hage 2010, 114–117).

This revival hinges on a longer process dating from the 1980s which, as Caroline Holbrook and Keir Reeves argue, saw the emergence of a new form of Anzac mythology which re-defined the Anzac image, and in doing so, has made the Anzac central to depictions of the Australian national character in recent decades (Holbrook and Reeves 2020, 3). Indeed, until that time, even the more prominent Gallipoli Campaign largely was overlooked, and public attitudes toward Anzac mythology in the 1960s and 1970s was characterised by ‘apathy and hostility’ (Holbrook and Reeves 2020, 1). The modern Anzac tradition has proved versatile, which, as a conflation of both history and myth, captures the ‘political-military imperatives of successive national governments’ and also the ‘folkloric stereotype of the digger’ (Seal 2007, 135). Thus, the Anzac, about which Australians demonstrate little intellectual curiosity, but great ‘sensitivity to its exploitation and disparagement’ (Holbrook 2020, 249), has a role in both top-down histories characterised by official state narrative and commemoration as well as in grassroots traditions, illustrating a hallmark of Australian culture that has an ‘ability to hold ambivalent, even contradictory perceptions together’ (Seal 2007, 143). It is this porosity which Israel also has deployed in foregrounding Indigenous Anzacs (discussed below).

This strengthening of state ties between Australia and Israel via commemoration represents an alliance forged through forgetting (Sahhar 2015a, 186–187). In the early twenty first century with the approaching centenary of World War I, work in Australia was directed towards ‘reviving’ the memory of the Palestine Campaign, which ex-servicemen and military buffs felt had been overshadowed by the legend of Gallipoli (Pitt 2004, xiii). In the lead up to the centennial, the Park of the Australian Soldier was opened in Beersheba in 2008 and one hundred descendants of the Australian Light Horsemen travelled to Israel for the occasion (Chulov 2008). The park was to form a significant part of the Australian commemorative trail, representing a site of Australian achievement in the Middle Eastern theatre of war. In this respect, Susan Balderstone suggests that commemoration, driven by the Australian Light Horse Association and the Pratt Foundation, only more recently has been incorporated into Israeli practice of memorialisation (2018, 20–21).

At the time of this revival, one speculation was that the Battle of Beersheba had been largely omitted from Anzac celebration due to the December 1918 Surafend Massacre (Reeves 2012). The massacre involved a largely pre-meditated killing of all the Palestinian male inhabitants of Surafend, after which Anzac soldiers torched the town. Mention of the incident is made by Henry Gullet in The Australian Imperial Force in Sinai and Palestine, 1914–1918 (Volume VII of the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918), despite opposition to its inclusion by Henry Chauvel, a senior Australian officer who had succeeded to the command of the Desert Column in April 1917. However, as Paul Daley argues, Australian involvement in the massacre was obscured by the ‘loyalty and deception with which the Australians covered for one another and comprehensively blamed the New Zealanders’ (Daley 2017, 267). Ultimately, the Australian government joined with New Zealand in paying compensation for the massacre after the war, though Australia was held responsible for a lesser sum than its New Zealand counterpart (Daley 2017, 302).¹ Daley (2017, 262) suggests that Allenby’s response to the massacre, particularly his apportioning of blame to the Australians, worked to diminish knowledge or memory in Australia of the Australian role in the Palestine Campaign. Specifically, Daley points to Allenby’s withdrawal of recommendations for the decoration of Australian soldiers (2017, 265), and both omissions of their role or disparagement in official, and officially reported, speeches (2017, 295–297). Yet, it would be an oversimplification to say that the Surafend massacre alone was the cause for the neglect of the Palestine Campaign in Australia.²

In 2015, on the centennial anniversary of Gallipoli, the Australian government sought for the first time to incorporate Indigenous service explicitly into state commemorative events (Beaumont 2018, 338). This marked an historic shift in Federal attitude to acknowledgement of Indigenous ex-service people. Over the last century, recognition for Indigenous ex-servicemen has been ad hoc and inconsistent leading Richard Trembath to conclude that ‘for Indigenous soldiers overall, their reward for war service was to be omitted from the Anzac narrative’ (2020, 114). More recently, Joan Beaumont shows that the absence of recognition of Indigenous service people has been framed around a prohibition to identify outside of collective military units or to march in explicitly Indigenous ex-service groups; thus leading to the Coloured Diggers March in Sydney’s Redfern since 2007 (Beaumont 2018, 329, 335–336). Yet as Philippa Scarlett observes, the Anzac legend has been a malleable one, and recent integration of the role of Indigenous servicemen is testament to the legend’s ‘plasticity’, which Scarlett argues ‘has facilitated the incorporation of Aboriginal war service into the current incarnation of the Anzac myth’ (2015, 164). Yet, she cautions that this achievement has resulted from ‘a misrepresentation of the context and circumstances relating to mateship in the wartime and post-war experience of Aboriginal servicemen’ (Scarlett 2015, 164).

Similarly, almost a decade after its opening, the Australian Soldiers Park has become a site of incorporating the history of Australia’s Aboriginal servicemen into the Anzac legend, specifically the Palestine Campaign. This project, discussed below, has identified significant participation of Aboriginal servicemen in the Palestine Campaign, and is now a key to Israel’s revival of the memory of this campaign. This exemplifies both an Australian-Jewish and Israeli will to highlight the State’s connection with Indigenous Australians, fostering both association with, and proximity to, indigeneity.

Narrative Appropriation and Israel’s Struggle for Indigeneity

The development of relations between the Australian-Jewish community and the Australian Aboriginal community is an important link to understanding the twenty first century appropriation of Aboriginal history in the Israeli paradigm. Barbara Bloch notes that the connection, largely forged in the 1980s and 1990s, was founded on a shared ‘victim narrative’ and a recognition in the Australian-Jewish community that its approach to issues of racism needed to extend beyond self-interest given their privileged status in Australia (Bloch 2005, 258). Bloch argues that for Jewish-Australians, the Aboriginal community offered a low-cost alliance, through which they could maintain a history of suffering by identifying with people whose history and present ‘had little direct impact on Jewish immigrants’ (Bloch 2005, 264–265). While some aspects of this relationship have been positive, such as the solidarity of Tikkun Olam for Indigenous land rights in the 1988 bicentenary of British colonial settlement, Bloch argues the relationship also implicitly has maintained Jewish status as a suffering people and produced a discourse that obscures the more accurate parallel between Aboriginal and Palestinian people (Bloch 2005, 265). Examining the basis of alignment from a Jewish-Australian perspective, Bloch takes the trope of the long-suffering Jew, arguing the alliance is premised on a similar characterisation of Aboriginal experience, making Indigenous Australians sympathetic figures to Jewish-Australians, in contrast with Palestinian experience which is negated on the grounds of their own violence. Yet this sense of connection is not supported by the historical record, which indicates a continuous history of Aboriginal resistance to invasion (Bloch 2005, 267).

A key example of the incorporation of Aboriginal history into Israeli State History via the Australian-Jewish community is through recovery of the story about the Australian Aborigines’ League’s protest against Jewish persecution following Kristallnacht (1938). This landmark action, led by [Yorta Yorta man [IS YORTA YORTA the name of an Aborginal town, family, tribe?] William Cooper, a life-long Aboriginal rights campaigner, who sought to deliver a petition to the German consulate in Melbourne in December 1938, the only initiative of its kind staged at the time. Refused entry, the League left their petition at the door. The resolution, made ‘on behalf of the Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia’, condemned ‘the cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi Government of Germany’ (Donovan 2012). A plaque commemorating the march was unveiled in December 2002, at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum, along with a second plaque acknowledging traditional ownership of land where the Museum is situated (Jewish Telegraphic Agency 2002). However, the story was more widely acknowledged in 2008, 70 years after the protest, when it came to the attention of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, notwithstanding that Aboriginal activist and historian, Gary Foley, had alerted the executive director of the Melbourne Holocaust Museum to its existence in 1999. It is worth considering the timing of the 2008 mobilisation of this story, at a time when the failure of Oslo was in evidence and, as documented by Ilan Pappé, concurrent with an era in Israel seemingly less able than ever to acknowledge its role in Palestinian dispossession (Pappé 2014, 255–260). At a ceremony in the Victorian State Parliament in December 2008, Yuval Rotam termed Cooper ‘a hero to the Jewish people’ (Sarzin and Sarzin 2010, 6). At the ceremony, members of the Cooper family presented Rotam with eucalyptus leaves decorated in the colours of the Aboriginal flag with Rotam’s own name inscribed on one (Goldberg 2008). These are now on permanent display at the Jewish Holocaust Museum.

This ceremony preceded another ceremony in Israel, arranged by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), to honour Cooper’s protest by planting seventy trees in the Martyrs’ Forest (situated on the depopulated Palestinian village Bayt Mahsir and others), near Jerusalem. Sponsored by the Pratt Foundation, the planting took place on Israel’s Day of Remembrance, in April 2009. The first tree was planted by Cooper’s grandson and watered with Murray River water, while the ground was dusted with earth from Yorta Yorta land (Shemar 2009). This symbolic merging of Aboriginal land offered, in the Jewish-Israeli context, an attempt at the kind of homeliness to which the settler-colonial imperative aspires, using recognition by the Aboriginal community to assert its own, naturalizing claim to indigeneity.

While the project of afforestation is not alone in a canon of Israeli ceremonies that assert and seek to embed Jewish-Israeli belonging in the land, such as is demonstrated in the work of Mendelson and Smith (2006, 187–211) on state funerial ceremonies, the JNF’s systematic pursuit of this project over the last century makes it noteworthy. The JNF has implemented a project of tree planting as a strategy of the Zionist project, turning vast areas from which Palestinians were depopulated into forests in which the trees and whole forests are dedicated to both people and events. As Irus Braverman (2009, 332) argues, the JNF project is

a selective project of commemoration … which utilizes the archetypical nature of the tree as both alive and rooted. The birth of the tree is thus tied to the birth of the old-new nation in the old-new land through the old-new forest.

The work of the JNF is also intimately linked to memory and memorialisation in Israel which is ‘carefully choreographed’ and ‘elides 2, 000 years of non-Jewish forest history’ (Braverman 2009, 337). The depopulation of Palestinians through JNF projects reflects not only the settler-colonial fiction of terra nullius but also an Israeli narrative of ecology and natural protection (Braverman 2009, 341). Moreover, as Braverman (2009, 341) argues, it ‘is unique in its strong emphasis on security’. The monocultures thereby produced, initially favouring eucalypts but now overwhelmingly pine forests, have themselves had damaging ecological consequences (Braverman 2009, 343). Yet despite the national commitment to the JNF project, Joanna Long suggests that scientific mapping has been scant in part because maps would reveal that the forests are intentionally situated on the ruins of depopulated Palestinian villages and have played a geo-political role in Zionist-Israeli history (Long 2005, 29). This JNF strategy was developed in advance of the state, and has been used as a method ‘for holding lands so that they wouldn’t revert to Arab hands’ (Nicholson 2015).³ Uri Davis characterises this policy as a ‘cover up’ of Israel’s ‘crimes against humanity by ethnic cleansing and through the destruction of 400 to 500 Palestinians villages’ (quoted in Braverman 2009, 351). Davis views JNF afforestation as having, as its first priority, the intention of hiding war crimes.

In commemorating the protest of the Australian Aborigines’ League through JNF plantings, the ceremony was imbued with the strategy of ‘green-washing’, which appeals to progressive environmental norms while masking the inherent violence of settler-colonial dispossession, and it has had a significant role ‘in the struggle for international public opinion’ (Braverman 2009, 361). It further affirmed, through association, Israel’s claim for its Jewish citizens to naturalised belonging as indigenous subjects, even as the act entrenched Palestinian exclusion from their ancestral land. Following the 2008-09 Israeli assault on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, which catalysed support for the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement (Sahhar 2015b, 140), the Israeli government has courted Indigenous people fighting in their own domestic contexts for increased sovereign recognition. In the US, Kauanui (2014) has coined this ‘Redwashing’, a process which enhances Zionist claims to indigeneity in Israel and seeks to conceal Israel’s ongoing project of settler-colonialism. Kauanui argues that this serves a cynical political agenda, that does not ultimately avail an Indigenous group with any advantages in their domestic context. She concludes that Redwashing is dismissive and detrimental to native survivance, a concept coined by Gerald Vizenor (2008, 1).

Israel’s recent relationship-building efforts with Australian Aboriginal communities, engaged in commemorating Aboriginal Anzacs in the Palestine Campaign, signals an Australian dimension to Kauanui’s theorization of Redwashing. Until recently, as this article has pointed to, Australia systematically had omitted Aboriginal servicemen from Australian military history, recalling neither the Frontier Wars and Aboriginal resistance to colonization, nor the contributions of Aboriginal servicemen in the foreign campaigns of the Anzacs, campaigns which form one of the most significant constitutive national myths of white-Australia. In 2017, the centennial of the Battle of Beersheba and other battles of the Palestine Campaign, Aboriginal soldiers for the first time led the national Anzac Day march in Australia (Brennan 2017). That same year, the JNF arranged a 10-day-long program of commemorative events for the Anzac campaign in Israel. Of the 100 guests, the event included 12 descendants of Aboriginal servicemen as part of the Rona Tranby Trust (the Trust) project to recover stories of Aboriginal soldiers which culminated in a documentary, Truth Be Told: Lest We Forget, screened on SBS in 2018 (Lidman 2017). As the Times of Israel reported, it sought to ‘shed light on [the Australian] Army’s discrimination at home’(Lidman 2017).

It remains unclear exactly how many Australian WWI servicemen were Indigenous, however as Scarlett (2015, 167) argues,

the degree of identification volunteers had with their culture was almost certainly not understood by the white men they associated with, including recruiters, oblivious to the fact that culture could exist as a continuing substratum in the face of suppression by authority.

Scarlett further notes that the Aboriginal men who enrolled lacked uniformity in their places of origin, and that those soldiers ‘described as ‘Aboriginal’, were far from a homogenous group’ (2015, 165–166); although she suggests a certain commonality among Aboriginal volunteers with respect of their disadvantage (Scarlett 2015, 164). While amendments made in 1909 to the Defence Act 1903 excluded men from service who were ‘not substantially of European origin or descent’, a military order in May 1917 substantially removed this barrier.⁴ This change to policy appears to have been a response both to ‘the carnage and catastrophic losses on the Western Front’ (Maynard 2017, 242), and the beleaguered issue of legislated conscription which had been divisive in Australian politics and ultimately was rejected (Bongiorno 2018, 7). Despite regulations, many had enlisted prior to this, by circumventing federal policy in their paperwork, however the change to policy did see a spike in Aboriginal enlistment (Glynn 2018; Scarlett 2015, 168).

Truth Be Told, which follows descendants of Aboriginal soldiers who served in Palestine, examines questions such as why they wished to join the army given the treatment of Aboriginal people in Australia. As Beaumont and Cadzow (2018, 4) have observed, ‘many who served in past conflicts left no record of their motivation’. They suggest however that ‘many wished to exercise their own agency: to better their economic situation, to improve their political status, and to demonstrate their equality with other Australians’ (Beaumont and Cadzow 2018, 4); however, Trembath (2020, 114) notes the inequalities and injustices that Aboriginal servicemen nevertheless faced. The narrative of the documentary suggests similarly that some who enlisted did so as leverage in future negotiations with Australian authorities on their return, although discriminatory policies of the time denied them the benefits offered returned non-Aboriginal servicemen. It is further worth noting that testimony indicates Indigenous servicemen sought to serve their ‘country’ should be treated with a degree of caution, since this is ‘a rich and nuanced term which embraces not only the Australian nation, the traditional focus of patriotism and loyalty, but also the land that has remained so central to the livelihood, culture and spirituality of Indigenous communities’ (Beaumont and Cadzow 2018, 4).⁵

Truth Be Told participates explicitly in Israel’s strategy of associative indigenization when it features a participant who raises the idea that for Aboriginal Australians, the notion of trying to take someone else’s land is foreign to Indigenous law and culture (Glynn 2018). These remarks are positioned to frame a section on the Gunditjmara people and the Eumeralla war, a battleground of Australia’s Frontier Wars, which the documentary sought to connect with the Battle of Beersheba. One of the few contemporaneous written records of Eumeralla is that of a settler, Thomas Alexander Browne, writing under the pseudonym Rolf Boldrewood:

All of a sudden war broke out. The reasons for this last resource of nations none could tell. The whites only wished to be let alone. They did not treat the black brother unkindly. Far from it. … They were even sufficiently interested to make a patient study of the language and to acquire a knowledge of tribal rites, ceremonies, and customs (1884, 50).

This account not only highlights the opacity of Indigenous resistance to Australian settlers at the time but parallels the Zionist narrative in which, as Ilan Pappé (2014, 51) summarises, ‘troubles seemingly erupt out of the blue, and Arabs assault Jews just like that. Thereafter, this is the essence of the ‘troubles’—attacks driven by incomprehensible and unintelligible hate.’

Recognition of Eumeralla and Indigenous resistance, like Israel’s recognition of Aboriginal servicemen, exemplifies the problematic cultural project at work in Israel towards associative indigenization. The Trust’s documentary makes no reference to the Palestinians who populated the land in 1917, illustrating the paradox of one settler-state recognizing the legitimacy of Aboriginal resistance and concomitant assertion of sovereignty in Australia. While Israel has foregrounded an historic connection with white Australia through the Battle of Beersheba and the Palestine Campaign, advancing the idea that the Anzacs had a role in liberating the future state, for more than a decade, it has now turned towards the role of Aboriginal servicemen to frame Aboriginal service in the Campaign as something readily relatable to a state project of self-indigenization. Richard Chauvel, grandson of Henry Chauvel, has said of contemporary commemoration: ‘Competing international and local interests cannot be simplified into a causal relationship between the Charge [referring to the central component of the Battle of Beersheba] and the State of Israel, however attractive the symbolism of chronological coincidence might be’ (quoted in Walker 2017). Yet, while national narratives should not be conflated with an historic record, the very function of public commemorative culture is to meld such discrete categories in order to shape a public perception in which Israel’s historic responsibility towards Palestinians is erased (Zerubavel 1995, 214–216).

In September 2019, The Aborigine and His Horse statue was unveiled (Aderet 2019). It depicts an Aboriginal serviceman, Jack Pollard, of the 11^th Light Horse, holding a bible as he leans, with his horse, over the grave of a fallen comrade. It is situated in ‘Tzemach’, which in 1917 was the Palestinian village Semakh. This depopulated Arab village was renamed, as has been Israeli practice (and is common in settler-colonial contexts), to both naturalise Jewish-Israeli relationships to place and bury the traces of Palestinian lives (Pappé 2006, 225–226). In a book on the Australian Light Horse, published for the Australian bicentenary in 1988, Ian Jones described Semakh as ‘a small Arab village and railway settlement’ of strategic importance (Jones 1987, 154).

The statue reinforces long-term attempts of Israel to eradicate its Palestinian ghosts and foregrounds a new positionality between Israel and Australia in which Israel is seen to champion Aboriginal servicemen against Australia’s erasure of that history. An article in Ha’aretz on the statue’s unveiling notes that it is part of an ‘historic correction that Australian society is undergoing in relations with Aborigines’ (Aderet 2019). It claims that ‘in light of the institutional racism that continues to plague the Aboriginal community’ in Australia, the contributions of Aboriginal people and their stories have been downplayed. The article’s author seems to see no irony in describing an historian working on the project as a ‘specialist in the history of pre-state Palestine’ (Aderet 2019). Yet if this statue is an institutional answer to the paradigm of settler-colonialism in Israel, a characterization it attempts to subvert by re-positioning the Jewish-Israeli community as indigenous, its ability to enforce this image is paradoxically through its own settler-institutions of state.

Aboriginal Monument in Samakh Railway Station (Shayshal2, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aboriginal_Monument_in_Samakh_Railway_Station.jpg, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en.)

Conclusion

The absence of Palestine in the cross-cultural re-imagination of commemorative practice for the centenary of the Palestine Campaign, which has eradicated Palestinian indigeneity and presence from that memory, is reflected in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Indeed, the Australian War Memorial was designed around a Palestinian cultural artifact, the sixth century Shellal mosaic, once the floor of a Byzantine church in Palestine. Uncovered by the Anzacs in May 1917 as they dug trenches on a hill from where both Gaza and Beersheba are visible, the mosaic was expropriated from Palestine and shipped in its entirety to Australia where it was installed in the Memorial’s Hall of Valour in 1941 (Australian War Memorial 2023a). Now positioned in an alcove behind a partition that was installed during a redevelopment in 2010, it was once its centrepiece. Further, the mosaic in the Hall of Memory, completed after World War II, styled by Napier Waller, echoes, as artist Tom Nicholson has shown, the Shellal mosaic, housed only a floor below (Nicholson n.d.). While the Memorial’s website attributes Waller’s inspiration to Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna, Italy, this link likely conceals a sensitivity to scrutiny of the practice of colonial pillaging of antiquities, and questions of their repatriation (Australian War Memorial 2023b). The fate of the mosaic seems to mirror the political and trans-national agendas driving commemorative practice in the recent centenary.

Australia was a key supporter of the creation of Israel in 1948 and has a record of complicity with the wide-spread erasure of Palestine and Palestinians in the last seven decades both at home and abroad (Manning 2018, 64–72). Australian friendship extended to Israel in cross-cultural commemorative practice around the Palestine Campaign throws light on both states’ selective national narrative-making and illuminates why the political question of Palestine has remained absent from the recovery of the eponymously titled Palestine Campaign. Israel’s claims to champion Aboriginal Australians and their history on the soil of the contemporary State of Israel simultaneously occlude Palestinian narrative and obscures their indigeneity. Studies such as this article document that process and interrogate the moral claim Israel makes to sovereignty based on indigenous right.

Israel’s quest for indigeneity via association highlights the unresolved tension of Zionism that as Zreik and Veracini argue has succeeded, ‘but not in full’ (Zreik 2016, 356; Veracini 2015, 268–269). Where associative indigeneity itself has not succeeded is in concluding a moral resolution for state legitimacy. Problematically, these cultural associations which bypass Palestinians entirely are proxies intended to ally the ‘anxiety of recognition’ from which the state suffers (Zreik 2016, 360). The demand by Israel at Oslo and elsewhere that Palestinians recognize the character of the state and its legitimacy signals the fundamental role of Palestinians as those who have the power to grant that recognition, which Israel is powerless to compel (Zreik 2016, 360–361). What the settler colonial paradigm has to offer such impasse, alongside indigenous/native studies, is an analytic tool able to challenge Zionist hegemony and identify fissures in Israel’s strategies that continue to occlude the imagining of a future that is both secure and just (Sabbagh-Khoury 2022, 70, 72). Indeed, the settlers may never become the natives, though they may stop being a settler (Zreik 2016, 357–358). Exchanging a settler identity for something else, however, requires a reckoning with history, including injustices and dispossessions past and present (Zreik 2016, 358, 360). If recognition is crucial to Israel, neither force nor negation will resolve this need (Zreik 2016, 361). While Israel continues to prosecute an indigenous diplomacy through cultural campaigns such as the recent commemoration of the 1917 Palestine Campaign, which deny history and negate Palestinian presence, a transformation of identity toward a state of existential legitimacy, will continue to elude the state and its citizens.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Tamar Blickstein and Erick Howard for convening a panel at the American Anthropological Association in Denver, 2015, where an early version of this paper was presented, as well as Gary Foley and Suzannah Henty for the opportunity to present a later version at the Black-Palestinian Solidarity Conference in Melbourne, 2019. To J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Shannon Woodcock and Keren Rubinstein for their thoughts on aspects of this paper, and to Justin Tighe for offering feedback on several drafts. The article benefited from several anonymous reviewers in preparation for publication. With thanks also to my colleagues at the Doha Institute and in this special issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Notably compensation was not paid to Surafend survivors, but rather to the British as compensation ‘if not for the actual massacre, then for the destruction of the village itself’ (Daley, 2017, 300).

2 See for example the arguments of Jean Bou (2007) on the historical neglect of the Palestine Campaign, and additionally Peter Manning’s account of the Palestine Campaign’s neglect in contemporary Australian newspapers (2018, 16–21).

3 Seed No. 24. This is an unusual book with no page numbers.

4 The order removed the exemption as follows: ‘half-castes may be enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force provided that the examining Medical Officers are satisfied that one of the parents is of European origin’, see Maynard (2017, 241–242).

5 While Maynard argues Aboriginal people fought ‘for their beloved country, Australia’ (2017, 240) this is disputed, such as in the account of Robert Hudson: ‘It says ‘for King and country’ underneath this photo of him, but I think they were firstly fighting for Gunai Kurnai Country, our own Country. I read the word ‘King’, but it means nothing to me. I think the old fellas fought for their own Country, right what we’re standing on’ (Hudson and Woodcock, 2022, 38).