Beersheba 1917-2017: The Commemoration

The Park of the Australian Soldier in Beersheba is dedicated in the memory of the Australian Light Horse Regiment, and was developed as a permanent memorial by the Pratt Foundation in 2004-2006. It was the foundation’s largest undertaking in Israel up to that time and acknowledges Australian involvement in the Middle East during that war. Sam Lipski AM is Chief Executive of The Pratt Foundation, President of the State Library of Victoria and a highly respected journalist and broadcaster. He was in Beersheba in October 2017 for the celebrations there of the centenary of the Australian Light Horse victory over the Turks in October 1917. On return to Australia, Sam Lipski addressed The Sydney Institute, on Wednesday 15 November 2017, to speak of the event and what it commemorated.

BEERSHEBA 1917-2017: THE COMMEMORATION

SAM LIPSKI

I want to thank Gerard for inviting me to return to The Sydney Institute. It’s actually 25 years, almost to the day, that I first spoke here. And I’ve got a very clear recollection of what I spoke about in 1992. It was about Israel, just after the late Yitzhak Rabin had been elected as Prime Minister. Journalists don’t often get a chance to be reasonably accurate about their predictions. But in 1992 I predicted that the election of Prime Minister Rabin, combined with the fall of the Soviet Union and other significant happenings in the Middle East, was the best chance that we had in the twentieth century for moving towards some sort of resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Well, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated barely three years later. A couple of weeks ago, Rabin’s assassination was marked in Israel.

Tonight I shall speak not just about the Centenary of the Australian Light Horse in a year of significant anniversaries. Certainly, it is such a year for modern Jewish history, for Zionism, and therefore for Israel. Let me just mention some of the dates.

This year, so far, has marked the 50^th anniversary of the Six-Day War, whose results are still with us. That was in June 1967. Less recognised, not even in Israel very much, was the 120^th anniversary in August of the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897. Theodore Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionist movement, proclaimed that “If you will it, it is no dream, it is no legend.” He added, “Today, at Basel, I have created the Jewish state. And if it will not happen in my lifetime, then 50 years from now it will.”

Almost to the day, 50 years later, we come to another anniversary, which we are approaching very soon on 29 November. It was the decision in 1947 by the United Nations General Assembly to create a partitioned state in Palestine – one for the Arabs and one for the Jews. And now, we have commemorated and celebrated the Centenary of the Australian Light Horse in Israel, in Beersheba, on 31 October 1917. And a few days after that battle was the Centenary of the Balfour Declaration. Lastly, there is the 75^th anniversary of the Battle of El Alamein in North Africa in 1942.  As with Beersheba, the Balfour Declaration, El Alamein, and the United Nation’s Partition Vote – all these anniversaries have an Australian connection.

Since I’ll be talking history, it’s only fair that I come clean about my own theory of history. Which, for want of a better name, I shall call “The Noodle School”. The Noodle School began in Poland in the nineteenth century when Tevye Bialystock (no relation to the Tevye who sits as the “Fiddler on the Roof”) went to the neighbouring shtetl, the village down the road, looking for a bride. Let’s just say that this particular Tevye was a bit shy when it came to the ladies. And he confessed before he went to his mother that he was very, very worried that he’d have nothing to say to the girl that the matchmaker had chosen for him to meet. “Don’t worry Tevye,” his mother told him. “Young women only want to talk about three things; food, family and philosophy. Remember that and you’ll be fine.” So Tevye meets the designated young lady and he sits there dumb. Not a word. Completely overcome with anxiety. And he desperately tries to remember what his mother had told him. “Ah yes, food!” So, summoning up all his courage, he asks, “Excuse me, but do you like noodles?”

“No,” comes the swift reply. Now Tevye’s really worried. What was his mother’s second topic? Ah, yes, the family.

“Uh, I was wondering do you have a brother?”

No. Comes the reply, even swifter than before. Now Tevye begins to panic. His mind is a blank. But suddenly it comes to him: philosophy. Philosophy, yes. A philosophical question. So he asks, “I know you don’t have a brother, and I know you don’t like noodles. But what if you had a brother, do you think he’d like noodles?”

The noodle theory of history is the one which seeks always to ask, “But what if?”

That question “But what if”, offers the most interesting questions that we should ask, and which I certainly find most interesting to ask, about history. I know that the first task of any historian, even an average historian, is to try and establish what actually happened. The great historians do that for us.  But they do more. As an example, consider the magnificent study by John Lukacs – Five Days in London: May 1940.

It’s a short book. Lukacs tells us how the five days between 24-28 May in 1940 changed the course of history, as the British War Cabinet debated whether to negotiate with Hitler or to continue the war. Prime Minister Winston Churchill won that debate, and a very close-run thing it was too. But what if? What if Churchill hadn’t prevailed? What if the foreign secretary, Viscount Halifax, had persuaded the cabinet to explore the possibility of negotiating a peace with Hitler. Remember, this was  happening as Dunkirk was unfolding. The Brits were not in a very good position. What if Viscount Halifax had won the day? He proposed using the still neutral Benito Mussolini, of all people, to be the honest broker between Hitler and the Brits. What if indeed?

Which brings me, in a very roundabout way, to the Australian Light Horse centenary. It might also offer a clue as to why I’d argue that, quite apart from the sheer audacity, the bravery and the military brilliance of the charge at Beersheba, the victory was a watershed in history. A turning point in the war against the Ottoman Empire and Israel and Palestine. I argue that the battle changed the course of history in the Middle East and established an important milestone on the road to the modern state of Israel which was proclaimed some 30 years later.

So I’d like to address the three themes advertised for my remarks this evening. Not only the Battle of Beersheba, but also the Balfour Declaration, and some of the other turning points in the 100 years of history between Australia and Israel.

But first, some words about the Ottoman Empire and World War 1. Because I suspect that without those preliminary words it would be quite a stretch to accept my argument that 800 Australian soldiers and their horses racing madly across some six kilometres of open ground against the fortified Turkish defences, where they were outnumbered about four to one, changed the course of history.

Before you can understand 1917 then, we have to go back to 1453. That was the year that Sultan Mehmed II conquered the Byzantine capital of Constantinople, not Istanbul, Constantinople. For nearly five centuries until 1918, the Ottomans were the greatest power in the Mediterranean and the greatest Islamic power in the world. – as the British historian Eugene Rogan has noted in his recent and very important book The Fall of Ottomans.  He points out that the vast library of material – in English – about the Middle Eastern fronts in World War I reflect British or allied experiences. Gallipoli was “Churchill’s debacle”. The Arab revolt was led by “Lawrence of Arabia”. And it was “Allenby’s conquest of Jerusalem”.

Social historians rely on the diaries and letters that they find in the Imperial War Museum, some in the Australian War Memorial, and in Wellington’s Alexander Turnbull library. But Rogan argues that it’s time to give the Ottoman front its rightful place in the wider history of both the Great War and the modern Middle East. And he describes the war in the Middle East in World War I as “an unprecedented conflict between international armies”.

Clearly, the majority of historians that write about the Great War don’t share Rogan’s pretty sweeping judgement about the Ottoman front. But I find it a useful corrective to the prevailing view. We have to move ourselves back to what was the prevailing view a century ago. Both the Entente allies – Britain, France and Russia – and their opponents – the Central Powers – Germany and Austro-Hungary – saw the Middle East as a side show. For them, the main theatres of war were on the Western and Eastern fronts. British leaders such as Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, and Field Marshall Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, were only interested in going to war against the Turks because they thought a quick victory there would shorten the war against the Central Powers. It was a big mistake. As the British and  Anzac forces found at Gallipoli, they had seriously underestimated their enemy. The Gallipoli defeat and the failures in the Dardanelles, in the Caucasus, in Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq) and in Palestine, meant that the war against the Ottomans turned out to be no sideshow.

But in the century that’s passed, certainly in the English speaking world, the war against the Ottomans barely features in the understanding of the Great War or indeed, of World War I. Not in the history books, not in the poetry and prose, and not in popular or high culture. The Great War means endless, senseless and pointless trench warfare and the slaughter of millions. It means the haunting and influential poetry about that trench warfare and everything that had come with it by such greats as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg and Guillaume Apollinaire. And it means Erich Maria Remarque’s great book, All Quiet on the Western Front. That best-selling pacifist novel, published in the decade immediately after World War I, did much to shape the West’s conceptual framework and imagination about the Great War.

This has been so even in Australia, where Anzac Day is the national memorial day which marks the Battle of the Dardanelles, where Gallipoli has been a household word for a century, where a whole new generation of Australians has embraced that legacy, against all the predictions that, like old generals, Anzac Day would just fade away. It hasn’t. A whole new generation has breathed new life and poignancy into the Anzac legend. In Australia, the connection to the former Turkish enemy is one of respect and empathy.

But also in Australia, the Gallipoli landing and the disastrous defeat at the hand of the Turks that followed, are viewed through a different lens of history. As somehow separate, self-contained and disconnected from the three years of war against the Ottomans that continued after Gallipoli in the Middle East. A war in which the Australian forces were so deeply involved and in which, one must say, they made a decisive contribution. Both in Palestine and in Syria.

To underline the point, the journalist and author Les Carlyon has written the two deservedly best-selling books about our involvement in the First World War. Gallipoli was one, and then The Great War. But Carlyon’s magisterial study is only about the Great War in Europe. The battlefields at Fromelles, Passchendale, Villieurs-Brettoneux and Polygon Wood. They’re all there. But there’s no mention of the war against the Ottoman empire. No Beersheba. No Jerusalem. No Damascus. This isn’t meant as a criticism of a very great writer. Nor is it meant in any way to diminish the sacrifice of so many young Australian lives. But it is a reflection of how Australians understand or, until recently, understood the First World War.

True. Some Australian authors have written important books about the Light Horse. Most notably Ion Idriess’ autobiographical account, the marvellous The Desert Column.  He virtually created the Light Horse legend. Idriess had fought with the Light Horse, and he knew what he was writing about. Which he did vividly and with great verve. But his book was first published in 1932. And although a second edition came out in 1951, it bypassed the generations of Australians that followed the 1960s.

It is also true that the films  The Forty Thousand Horsemen ( 1940) andThe Light Horsemen (1987), attracted attention when they were shown. More recently, Roland Perry, who has also written a John Monash biography, revisited the Light Horse campaign in Palestine and Syria. Perry has just published a new book entitled Monash and Chauvel, which takes up the story of Sir Harry Chauvel, the man who gave the command for the Light Horse to charge at Beersheba.  Chauvel  commanded not only the Australian Light Horse, but the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF),  which was made up of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles, the Australian Light Horse and the British Yeomanry, who were also mounted rifles.

Interestingly, Perry’s subtitle for his new book is :”How Australia’s two Greatest Generals changed the course of World History”. Phillip Bradley and Ian Jones have also written some very readable accounts of the Light Horse. But the books have had comparatively limited impact on the public imagination, outside the Light Horse families or Light Horse descendants.  And so the Australian role in the Middle East in World War I has been relatively unsung.

Until now. As we’ve seen with the Light Horse centenary commemorations in Israel just behind us. The fact that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull led a high-level Australian political and military delegation added a whole extra dimension of coverage to the colourful events. Added to that was the presence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu representing Israel. Many thousands of everyday Australians came to Beersheba. The wide and colourful media coverage, especially for the re-enactment, means that there are now much better prospects that the Beersheba story, and the story of Australians in the Middle East in World War I, will get the attention it has long deserved. I hope that will happen in Israel too.

The re-enactment involved 130 very committed members of the Australian Light Horse, dressed up in their full regalia with the emu plume in their hats. They rode Israeli horses because they couldn’t bring their horses from Australia. In earlier re-enactments, they charged and galloped across the same terrain. This time, they all lined up and, just as everybody thought they were about to charge, they walked their horses as a gesture of peace.

There are reasons, of course, for the historical disparity between the recognition given to the Western Front and the Middle East. By the early twentieth century the advent of the machine gun and heavy artillery meant that trench warfare and the sheer scale of death and injuries on the Western Front far exceeded the losses in the Middle East. Of the 60,000 Australian dead in the First World War, 45,000 of those 60,000 died on the Western Front. In the Middle East, under totally different battle conditions, the number of Australian deaths and injuries was 1400.

There’s something abhorrent and distasteful about the calculus of war casualties. And comparisons of death statistics in a war, in my view, are always invidious. But that’s what historians do. At Gallipoli alone, the fighting dragged on for eight months. Australia lost 8709 dead. It was a military disaster and a defeat. At Beersheba, the battle was over in an hour and half with a loss of 31 Light Horsemen. And it was a victory. One of the great  military victories, not just in Australian military history, but by any standard.

Of course, there are many other explanations for the disparity of understanding about the war fronts. I mention it only to emphasise and to underline my general point. Which is that the Light Horse charge at Beersheba was not only an audacious military victory, but indeed a watershed in history.

Consider the timing. As the Light Horse charged in Beersheba in the late afternoon of 31 October 1917, the British War Cabinet met in London and agreed to the Balfour Declaration, so named after Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour who signed the letter which became known as “the Declaration”. But the letter wasn’t handed over immediately to its recipient, Lord Rothschild. The letter was actually dated 2 November, although the War Cabinet had agreed to its wording on 31 October.

The Balfour Declaration was important for two fundamental reasons. It was the first time in 1900 years since the Jews had lost their sovereignty in Judea, that a major world power had publicly recognised that the Jews had national rights in Palestine. It galvanised the embryonic Zionist movement throughout the Jewish world. The vast majority of Jews in 1917 were not Zionists. The Zionist movement was a small, largely scattered movement through Eastern Europe. It hadn’t won the hearts and minds of the Jewish people.

But, with the Balfour Declaration, the Jewish world and not just the Zionist movement was galvanised.  The second reason the Balfour Declaration mattered, in geo-political terms, was because it meant that Britain had a basis for becoming the mandatory power in Palestine after World War 1. Which they were for some three decades. By late 1947, however, Britain had had it. They said, to the Jews and Arabs, “a pox on both your houses”, and they left. But 70 years later, the results of that British decision are still with us.

Now, contrary to some exaggerated claims, the Light Horse capture of Beersheba did NOT lead to the Balfour Declaration just three days later. It didn’t. Nor could it have done. After all, the Zionist movement’s efforts, led by Chaim Weizmann, to convince the British government to support “a  Jewish national home in Palestine” had begun in earnest at least two years earlier. Nevertheless, in my view, that doesn’t diminish the Battle of Beersheba’s significance for Zionist and Israel’s history.

Because, had the Light Horse charge at Beersheba failed – and it was a totally audacious and risky decision which could have been a complete catastrophe – Britain’s commander General Edmund Allenby would have had a very hard time making a third attempt to take Gaza. There was a defensive line from Gaza to Beersheba, which the Turks had held despite two earlier attacks against Gaza. Without taking Gaza, and breaking the defensive line, who knows how long it would have taken Allenby to move the British and Anzac troops north to take Jerusalem.

With the capture of Beersheba, however, it enabled Allenby to outflank the Turkish positions around Gaza, and move north to enter Jerusalem. Which he did on 11 December. Just before Christmas. Thus giving David Lloyd Geroge’s government the “Christmas present” they had hoped for. The news from the Western Front was terrible. But here, at last, was a victory. Not only that. The conquest of Jerusalem by Britain, a Christian power, after centuries of Muslim rule, had a profound impact internationally.

Now, here’s my noodle theory of history. You could argue that sooner or later the Allied powers would have defeated the Ottomans. But they might not have done so. It was close. Much closer than we assume today. The Ottomans might have held on in Palestine until a negotiated settlement. In which case I would argue that the history of the Zionist movement could not have progressed as it did under the British Mandate. Which, deeply flawed as it was and opposed to an independent Jewish state as Britain became during the Mandate, it nevertheless gave the Zionist movement enough scope to create the conditions which enabled a state to emerge in 1948.

I agree that asking “What if” is always a perplexing question to pose to history. And nobody can prove what would “not have” happened. But the evidence suggests strongly that the Ottomans would not have allowed the Zionist movement to develop in Palestine to the degree that Britain did. So I believe we can make the case that the Battle of Beersheba not only changed the course of military history, but that of political history.

The centenary of the Balfour Declaration is 2 November 2017. But in that first week of November 75 years ago, there was another battle involving Australian troops. In early November 1942, the AIF’s 9^th Division, after suffering almost 6000 casualties, help to defeat Rommel’s German Forces at El Alamein. Had Rommel advanced further into Egypt and then into Palestine, the fate of the 600,000 Jews that were then in Palestine, does not bear thinking about.

But here again we have to ask the question: What if?  What if Rommel had broken through at El Alamein? The battles for Beersheba in 1917 and El Alamein in 1942, preceded Israel’s establishment. But, in different ways, I believe the Australian role in each war helped pave history’s path towards the Jewish state.

After Israel’s establishment, the Australian military contributed significantly to Israel’s security on two other notable occasions. In the First Gulf War, in 1991, and in the Second Gulf War 2003. Now is not the time to summarise those two more recent conflicts. Except to note that I had direct experience of the Australian involvement in the First Gulf War because I was in Israel at the time when the Scud missiles were flying out of Iraq. They usually came in the middle of the night, around 2.30 or 3 am. Israel always had seven or eight minutes warning time. The television and radio would come on and you’d be warned. Because we thought Saddam Hussein was going to launch chemical attacks, we would take our gas masks and go into sealed tents and wait for the signal to say, “The Scuds have landed”.

How did the Israelis have seven or eight minutes warning time? Answer: because of the joint Australian/United States satellite stations at Pine Gap and Nurrungar. When you launch a Scud, or any missile, it gives off a heat-blast. The satellites going overhead pick that up. In real time, the signal went from Nurrungar to the Israelis, and the Israelis were able to give people enough warning time to get into the shelters. Saddam Hussein fired 39 Scuds at Israel. There was only one casualty: a poor old woman who didn’t know how to tie on her gas mask properly and she suffocated. But no one died from the Scuds because they had warning time to get into the shelters.

The Coalition of the Willing attacked Iraq in March 2003. Two weeks later, Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon phoned Prime Minister John Howard to thank him for an Australian SAS mission in Iraq’s western desert. The Australians had gone in 48 hours before the invasion of Iraq to destroy the Scud launching sites and the Scud mobile missile carriers aimed at Israel. They did a very good job. When I read about that in 2003, it struck me that it was the fourth time, since 1917, that Australia’s military had been there for critical turning points in Zionist and Israeli history.

What surprised me, after I wrote a column about those four turning points in The Australian Jewish News, was how many readers told me they’d never heard of the Australian Light Horse and Beersheba. They asked why we don’t know more about it. Some asked whether there was a Light Horse memorial in Beersheba. I explained that the 31 Light Horsemen killed in the charge were buried alongside hundreds of other Anzac and British soldiers in the Commonwealth War Graves’ Cemetery in Beersheba. But there was no monument.

I thought more about those questions from readers. As The Pratt Foundation had had a presence in Israel for some years, and in Beersheba in particular, I proposed the idea for a memorial park to Richard Pratt. It would be a link between Australia and Israel and a gift to the people of Beersheba. Richard turned to me and said: “You aren’t going to build me a bloody museum?” I said, “No, we want a living park.” And he said, “Great. Go and tell Digger about it.”  Digger was the late Major General William Brian “Digger” James. Digger James and Richard grew up together in Shepparton. Digger became a very distinguished soldier; Richard became a billionaire. But they remained the closest of friends. I remember phoning Digger James and telling him about the idea. And he said, “Did you know that I’m the patron of the Australian Light Horse Association?” So the project was blessed from the beginning. I had Richard Pratt’s money behind us, and I had the wonderful mentoring and friendship of Digger James.

Richard and Digger were there when we opened the park in 2008, as was my wife Aura. Richard and Digger are no longer with us. But their widows, Jeanne Pratt and Barbara James, were there just two weeks ago in the Park of the Australian Soldier. That was the park we dedicated in 2008 as a living memorial. It features the marvellous sculpture by the great Australian sculptor Peter Corlett, who put his fantastic bronze memorial to the Australian Light Horsemen together in his studio in Fitzroy, Melbourne. I had the great privilege of seeing it take shape over a period of months. As it was coming together, Jeanne Pratt who knew Peter Corlett asked, “Has Peter done the face yet?” When I said no, she said “Why doesn’t he make the face that of Digger James.”  And that’s what Peter did. If any of you have the opportunity to go and see this marvellous, epic bronze sculpture of the Light Horseman charging in full flight over the Turkish trenches, look at the face: It’s Digger’s.

So, 100 years after the Battle of Beersheba, in the twilight of 31 October – just two weeks ago – the Park of the Australian Soldier hosted the Light Horse Centenary’s concluding ceremony. At the end of it, after the Last Post had been sounded and the Ode had been recited, Jeanne Pratt used the immortal words “Let’s Eat” to invite Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and the other 2499 guests from Australia and Israel to enjoy a Kosher Aussie BBQ. All I can say is that it was a day to remember, in a place to remember. Lest we forget.