Remembrance Day is commemorated each year on 11 November. It is a time not only to remember those who have given their lives in military service, but to reflect on the historical events that provide this day with its international importance. What does it mean to truly reflect on that history, on those events, at this time of war?
The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 marked the end of the First World War — the theatre which gave rise to the ANZAC myth that has played such an outsized role in Australia’s sense of national identity. But while the Gallipoli campaign of 1915–1916 remains central to the Australian imagination, few would be aware that many of those same ANZACs went on to fight in Palestine from 1916–1918.
Among them was my grandfather Frederick William Crawford Wise. He enlisted as a 22-year-old iron worker from Balmain, and went on to join the Second Australian Light Horse Brigade. He fought at ANZAC Cove then Egypt and finally in Palestine, where his division took part in two failed attempts to take Gaza, before the famous “Battle of Beersheba” on 31 October 1917 which ultimately led to the fall of Gaza a week later. Yes, that Gaza.
That same week, on 2 November 1917, the Balfour Declaration was issued in London:
His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
As someone who has marched in solidarity with Palestinians these last few weeks, it is now confronting to see place names like “Deir el Belah”, “Gaza”, and “Rafa” on my grandfather’s military records. I never knew him. He died in 1932 when my father was six years old. There are no family stories about what kind of man he was, or what he thought of the part he played in the war. I can only imagine what he might have thought, and that imagining inevitably occurs through the lens of the events of October and November 2023.
Australians all know the ANZAC myth. These were ordinary young men who exemplified the best ideals of mateship and bravery, who were a little bit larrikin and nurtured a healthy disdain for authority — particularly of the British kind. They were decent blokes who would stand up for the underdog, do the right thing, who believed in the fair go, and knew right from wrong. This may be a bit blokey, but it sounds like a fairly decent moral compass to me, however much or little it is grounded in reality. To invoke the “ANZAC legend” is to imagine ourselves as having inherited that spirit, and believe those ideals are worthy of shaping us as moral agents today.
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Of course, as a student of history I know legends are as much parable as truth, and involve forgetting as much as remembering. And so I asked myself: What does my grandfather’s part in that slice of the war mean for me today? What forgetting needs remembering? And what do those ideals demand of me in 2023?
What would my grandfather have to say about what became of historic Palestine after 1917, about the commitments given in Britain’s Balfour Declaration — given that was the side he fought for? What would he say about the Nakba in 1948 when Palestinians were driven from their homes in order to establish the state of Israel? What would he have thought about the subsequent decades-long occupation of the West Bank, or about the discrimination and racial violence carried out in Israel’s name? What would he think about the current decimation of Gaza, which has left more than 8,000 dead, around half of them children?
I’d like to think my grandfather would have said something like: “Bugger that … that doesn’t seem right … You can't just go about stealing people’s land and taking their homes. Bombing the crap out of ordinary folk going about their business in Gaza … bombing kids — they’re just bloody children! Poor bloody Palestinians have been done over by the Brits, and then by Israel. I didn't know that’s what I was fighting for.”
The inscription on the ANZAC War Memorial in Sydney’s Hyde Park reads: “Let silent contemplation be your offering”. And that is what I shall do this Remembrance Day. I will reflect on what they fought for, and upon what those ANZACs might be thinking now. I’ll reflect on the consequences for Palestinians of those battles he fought, I’ll reflect on the loss of Israeli lives on 7 October and the fate of the hostages. I will reflect on the many Palestinian lives lost before and since that day. I will think back to 11 November 1918.
On 12 November 2023, I will return to Hyde Park and march alongside the many thousands in Sydney and around the world who call for an immediate ceasefire, for meaningful peace in Gaza, and for freedom for the Palestinian people.
Amanda Wise is a Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at Macquarie University.