The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has ignited national conversations about the symbolism of public monuments: What does a nation-state display, memorialise and commemorate? What do these markers of national culture communicate about a state’s values and self-imaging? How do states construct their narratives and project that identity to their citizens and others?
While specificity is important in the American context of the state sanctioned murder of George Floyd, this aspect of the movement has offered expression of not just transnational solidarity but a re-examination of national particularisms. BLM is foregrounding national narratives in their state contexts, thus presenting an invitation to critically re-examine both ephemeral and concrete expressions of national public cultures. We have seen defacements, decapitations, and demolitions of statues that herald this work. In Bristol, a slave trader was rolled into the sea. Across the United States, statues of Confederate military heroes, slave traders, and the originary symbol of America’s colonisation, Christopher Columbus, have been dismantled. Meanwhile in Sydney, the state deployed police to guard a statue of Captain James Cook in Hyde Park. A police aid proves just how much statues matter. As public monuments, they insist on a version of history. In their public context, statues make claims about a state’s narrative and propound a specific point of view.
First Nations people understand the symbolic violence of colonial statues and the damaging role of public memorialization. In Australia, what have been memorialized in statues, in place names, and in public ceremonies, are many of the great land thieves and genocidal butchers of the Aboriginal nations. Australia’s vociferous memorialization of its colonial culture is as equally as it has been its silence on the subject of active Aboriginal resistance. Indeed, it did not take BLM to create this awareness among the colonised. An image of Captain James Cook’s statue at St Kilda beach, covered in pink paint and inscribed with the line ‘no pride in genocide’, is a favoured teaching tool of mine. Its is a concise intervention that offers students a clear alternative reading of Australia’s Day and national culture. Yet, politicians have called these interventions cowardly or vandalism. On the contrary, they should be recognized as essential to determining and re-framing public culture. After BLM, it would be deluded to claim that monuments are benign, or that they do not perform a state-sanctioned violence that institutionalize collective narratives which comprise a national identity. It is precisely in looking at what BLM has offered to conversations about public culture that we must look at how Israel, over the last decade and a half, has sought to hijack the legacy of the Palestine Campaign, and in so doing, to prosecute a claim to indigeneity.
The Palestine Campaign is a crucial battle-front in World War I that witnessed great participation by Australian soldiers. It was largely overlooked in 20th century commemoration of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACS).[1] Several theories have been advanced to why it was not recalled as one of the legendary highpoints of Australian military history in public culture. One theory suggests that the Surafend massacre of 1918, in which ANZACs executed a village of Palestinian men, accounted for the suppression. But the neglect is more systemic and instrumentalized by school curriculums; where for decades, it has been mandated that middle-school students study the federation of Australian colonies and the nation’s ‘baptism of fire’. Peter Weir’s stirring film, Gallipoli, featuring a young Mel Gibson is essential. Gallipoli has come to be a shorthand for many elements of the national character and Australian values. We watched the tragedy of the Battle of the Nek unfold, wondering how successive waves of young Australian men continued to surge over the trenches to their deaths. The answer came to characterize one version of Australian values, one that is associated with the history wars of the John Howard years. Survivors of this military debacle affirmed they did not want to disappoint their mates.
In contrast, the Palestine Campaign offered a more ambivalent legacy—a success to be sure—but a titular embarrassment after 1948. Emblazoned on war memorials around the country, Palestine was otherwise little remarked upon as Australia’s Frontier Wars [2]. The Shellal mosaic, appropriated by Australian troops as a spoil of war from a trench near Gaza, was once the centerpiece of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Today, it is structurally obscured from view. How was Palestine eradicated from the Palestine campaign?
Paradoxically, the recent recuperation of the Palestine Campaign is tethered to a new direction in Israeli national culture. This signals two distinct shifts in the 21st century and points to mechanisms of nation building in settler-colonial states, where the originary violence of their founding remains unacknowledged and unaddressed. While the 21st century narrative making in Israel already drew links between the last great cavalry charge of the Australian Light Horse at the Battle of Beersheba and the birth of the Israeli state, more recently it has focused on the role of Aboriginal servicemen in the Palestine Campaign. This illustrates a new Israeli strategy of displacing Palestinians from the settler-colonial paradigm, rather claiming an Indigenous identity for Jewish-Israeli citizens. In celebrating the contribution of Aboriginal soldiers and highlighting their travails on Australian shores, Israel has sought to retrofit a connection with Aboriginal resistance and pose itself a champion and ally of contemporary Indigenous struggle. While both modes of identification are historically specious, the second heralds a new and disturbing era in the formulation of an Israeli identity.
In 2017, and for the first time, Aboriginal soldiers led the national ANZAC day march in Australia during the centenary of the Battle of Beersheba and other battles of the Palestine Campaign.[3] That year, the Jewish National Fund arranged a 10-day-long commemorative program in Israel, including 12 descendants of Aboriginal servicemen, as part of the Rona Tranby Trust project to recover their stories.[4] As the Times of Israel reported, this sought to “shed light on army’s discrimination at home”.[5] The Rona Tranby Trust also produced a documentary which examines questions such as why Indigenous men joined the army in the context of Australian state treatment of Aboriginal people in the early 20th century.[6] Yet perhaps the most important work of the documentary is to engage the narrative of the Frontier Wars and make a connection between those wars and the Battle of Beersheba.
On its face, there is scant connection between Indigenous resistance and a colonial war executed on foreign soil. However, the documentary, which makes no whatsoever reference to the people who populated that land in 1917, seeks to advance a connection in the idea that Beersheba and the Palestine Campaign of the ANZACs served as battles of liberation for their future state. To this end, Israel now foregrounds the role of Aboriginal servicemen to frame these battles as a mode of historic Indigenous solidarity between Israeli-Jews and Indigenous peoples in Australia.
In September 2019, Jewish-Israeli ties to the Aboriginal struggle were celebrated in the unveiling of a statue entitled ‘The Aborigine and His Horse’, It is positioned at an area known as Tzemach, although in 1917, it was called Semakh and formed “a small Arab village and railway settlement” of strategic importance.[7] An article in Ha’aretz on the statue’s unveiling notes that this is a stage in the “historic correction that Australian society is undergoing in relations with Aborigines”.[8] It notes 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 author of the article, however, sees no irony in describing an historian working on the project as a “specialist in the history of pre-state Palestine” while referring to Giora Goodman.[9] The statue must therefore be understood within its cynical context, which in aiming to align Jewish-Israeli identity with other Indigenous struggles, seeks as its implicit goal to negate Palestinian claims by denying the Native as native.
The depopulated Arab village of Semakh was renamed, as has been Israeli practice, to both naturalise Jewish-Israeli relationships to place and to bury the traces of Palestinian lives—whether by slaughter, displacement or denial—in their uneasy state.[10] The statue registers just the newest strategy in Israel’s project to eradicate its Palestinian ghosts who haunt the legitimacy of their state, proclaiming strengthened relations between Jewish-Israelis and Australian Aboriginals, while unselfconsciously foregrounding and sympathising with Aboriginal struggle and the injustices of the Australian settler-state. Yet we must be aware that this 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. This re-positioning is enforced, paradoxically and unmistakably hypocritically, through the institutional power of the Israeli settler state.
There are words for this turn in Israeli state culture. J. Kehaulani Kauanui has coined it “Red Washing” in the Native American context. In its Aboriginal iteration, “Black Washing” fits the bill. With my Palestinian pen, I throw paint on Israel’s hijacking of the Palestine Campaign, because paint is better than erasure. Paint draws attention to those symbols that populate our public spaces and insists on a contestation of their meaning. The project should be one of contestation rather than erasure, lest we forget.
[1] Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) was first formed in December 1914 during World War I in Egypt.
[2] The Frontier Wars describe an era of diverse Aboriginal resistance against colonial settlement, land expropriation, and violence in Australia. It is conservatively estimated to have lasted from the ‘first contact’ in 1788 to the early 20th century. During this period, substantial atrocity was committed by both official and unofficial bodies and groups of settlers, now widely acknowledged to have amounted to genocide against the Aboriginal peoples of Australia.
[3] Bridget Brennan, “Anzac Day: Indigenous Soldiers Thought ‘When We Got back We’d be Treated Differently’,” abc News, 25/4/2017, accessed on 19/2/2021, at: https://ab.co/3dgLtgR
[4] Melanie Lidman, “In Israel, Descendants of Aboriginal ANZAC Soldiers Retrace Forgotten Stories,” The Times of Israel, 24/10/2017, accessed on 19/2/2021, at: https://bit.ly/2Osg8NC
[5] Ibid.
[6] Erica Glynn (director), Truth Be Told: Lest We Forget, Erica Glynn & Tanith Glynn-Maloney (written by) (Alice Springs, NT: Since1788 Productions, 2018), 58 mins, aired on 11/4/2019, at: SBSONDEMAND.
[7] Ofer Aderet, “Israel Honours WWI Australian Aborigine Fighters at Centre Near Sea of Galilee,” Haaretz, 26/9/2019, accessed on 19/2/2021, at: https://bit.ly/3rS2z8A; Ian Jones, The Australian Light Horse (Sydney: Time Life Books, 1987), p. 154.
[8] Aderet.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006), pp. 225 - 226.
