00:08It was the Great War.
00:10The roar of artillery echoed across the four corners of the world.
00:15Death, destruction and hunger followed.
00:19Borders shifted, empires began to crumble,
00:22and the geopolitical map of the world was being redrawn.
00:26Britain fought against the Ottoman Empire,
00:30with Indian soldiers serving under British command
00:33in numerous battles across Palestine and the wider Middle East.
00:39Their courage and sacrifice are not in question.
00:44But more than a century later,
00:46Israel singled out one battle among many
00:49and gave it a new political meaning, Haifa.
00:54Today, Israel calls it the liberation of Haifa by Indian soldiers.
00:59But was it really a liberation?
01:01And if Haifa was liberated, liberated from whom?
01:06In 1918, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire,
01:11while India was under British colonial rule.
01:15Israel would have to wait another 30 years to be born.
01:18India had no sovereign government that decided to invade Palestine
01:23or send an army to liberate Haifa.
01:28So, when Israel claims today that Indian soldiers liberated Haifa,
01:33it gives their actions a sovereign political and military meaning
01:37that India itself had no authority to determine in 1918.
01:43This leads to a fundamental question.
01:46If Haifa was liberated, who was the liberator?
01:50The Indian soldiers, who were themselves subjects of colonial rule?
01:55Or Britain, the colonial power commanding the campaign?
02:00How could Britain be a liberator in Palestine,
02:03but a colonial power in India?
02:06Changing the geography does not change the nature of empire.
02:11So, what did Britain itself call what happened?
02:15This short film examines the Israeli rewriting
02:19of the shared history of India and Palestine,
02:22and warns of the dangerous consequences of reshaping that history
02:28to serve a contemporary political narrative.
02:32After British forces conquered Palestine,
02:36Britain established a military administration.
02:39Its official name was the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration,
02:45not the Liberated Territory Administration.
02:49And occupation was not merely a word.
02:52It reflected the legal reality of military occupation
02:56under the laws of war at the time.
02:58The terminology of the period speaks of occupation.
03:03British accounts of the campaign use terms such as
03:06captured, taken, fell, conquered.
03:10And India's own official publication, Last Post,
03:15Indian War Memorials Around the World 2014, states,
03:19The fortified town of Haifa fell to a cavalry charge
03:22by the Jodhpur Lancers.
03:25Elsewhere, broke through and took the town.
03:28Nowhere does it say, India or Indian soldiers liberated Haifa.
03:33Does India, today or historically, regard Ottoman rule in Palestine
03:39as a foreign occupation?
03:42We have found no evidence that either did.
03:45And did Palestinians themselves regard the advancing British army
03:49as a liberation force?
03:51Did Palestinians ask Britain to occupy Palestine?
03:55Did they ask Indian soldiers to liberate Haifa?
03:59Where is that historical request?
04:02Where is the evidence?
04:04Without it, one question remains.
04:07So how did a British imperial conquest come to be presented
04:11more than a century later as the liberation of Haifa?
04:16And why has this Israeli narrative become part of a claimed shared history?
04:23Between India and a state that did not exist in 1918?
04:28There is another witness to this history.
04:30It stands in the heart of New Delhi.
04:33Teen Murthy Memorial.
04:35Look at the historical geography recorded on the memorial.
04:39Haifa.
04:40Gaza.
04:41The Suez Canal.
04:43And one particularly important name, Palestine.
04:48The Teen Murthy Memorial was built nearly three decades before Israel was created.
04:54And there is another fact worth remembering.
04:57Both the Teen Murthy Memorial in New Delhi and the Indian Memorial in Haifa
05:03were established under British colonial rule.
05:07Their purpose was to commemorate soldiers who had served in the First World War.
05:12Not to commemorate relations between India and Israel.
05:17Which did not exist at all.
05:20Its inscriptions tell the history.
05:23If Teen Murthy tells the story of a historical connection,
05:27its inscriptions name Gaza, Jerusalem, and Haifa.
05:31They all point to one geography, Palestine.
05:37Why Haifa?
05:38Indian soldiers were part of a much larger imperial force,
05:42with troops drawn from Britain, India, Africa, Australia, and other parts of Asia and the British Empire.
05:50So why, more than a century later, has Israel singled out the Indian soldiers and transformed their role into the
05:59liberation of Haifa?
06:01Indian soldiers fought and died across Palestine and the wider Middle East.
06:06Official Indian records list 816 Indian First World War dead across Palestine.
06:14Among them, 491 at Ramleh War Cemetery,
06:20109 at the Gaza War Cemeteries,
06:2347 at the Indian Cemetery in Haifa.
06:27Others are recorded at additional cemeteries and memorials across Palestine.
06:33If sacrifice establishes historical significance,
06:38why does Haifa dominate the narrative?
06:41Why not Ramleh or Gaza?
06:43And if Haifa was liberated,
06:46were Gaza, Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley, Damascus, and Aleppo also liberations?
06:52Perhaps the answer lies not only in 1918, but in what came before and after it.
07:00On November 2, 1917, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration,
07:06supporting the establishment in Palestine of a national home for European Ashkenazi Jews.
07:13At the time, Britain held neither legal sovereignty over Palestine,
07:18nor effective control over the entire territory.
07:22Then came British military conquest, occupation, and the mandate,
07:27paving the way for the establishment of Israel and the 1948 Nakba,
07:34the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population.
07:40Indian soldiers were not responsible for what followed the occupation of Haifa.
07:47But calling their role the liberation of Haifa retrospectively attaches them to a political project that was not theirs.
07:57Is that a historical responsibility India should be asked to assume today?
08:03And there is another historical contradiction.
08:06In 1947, India voted against UN Resolution 181, which allocated Haifa to the proposed Jewish state.
08:17So how could colonized India have liberated Haifa in 1918, while independent India later rejected its allocation to the Jewish
08:28state of Israel?
08:29Has India's definition of occupation and liberation changed since independence?
08:37And how can that battle, nearly three decades before Israel existed, become evidence of a shared India-Israel history?
08:46There is another question rarely asked.
08:49The soldiers who fought at Haifa served in the British Indian Army before partition.
08:55They came from different regions, communities, and religions across British India.
09:02So when this battle is presented today as evidence of a century-old shared history between India and Israel,
09:10which India are we talking about?
09:14British India of 1918, or the Independent Republic of India, that emerged decades later.
09:22If Britain's occupation of Palestine was a liberation, then Britain was the liberator.
09:29Yet Zionist armed groups tell another story.
09:33They regarded British rule as a foreign occupation, fought against it, and sought to end it.
09:40Britain financed, armed, and commanded the campaign, with Indian soldiers serving in its forces.
09:48So how can today's Israeli narrative portray those Indian soldiers as the liberators of Haifa?
09:55When Zionist armed groups themselves fought British rule as a foreign occupation.
10:02This is why honoring these soldiers requires remembering the complete circumstances in which they served.
10:09As Shashi Tharoor has argued in addressing the legacy of British colonialism,
10:16historical injustice raises questions of acknowledgement, apology, and redress.
10:23Indian soldiers who fought and died far from home deserve recognition for their courage.
10:30But they should also be remembered as men living under a colonial system that deployed their service for imperial objectives.
10:40Mahatma Gandhi would later state, Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English.
10:48And this is why the debate over Haifa is not only Palestinian.
10:53It is also Indian.
10:56Because rewriting this history changes not only the story of Palestine.
11:01It risks changing the meaning of India's own colonial experience.
11:07If the British Empire can retrospectively be transformed into a force of liberation in Palestine,
11:15what does that make the Indians who resisted the same empire at home?
11:19Were they resisting colonialism?
11:22Or were they agitators, extremists, and terrorists, as Britain portrayed them?
11:30Portraying Indian soldiers as the liberators of Haifa is difficult to reconcile with what followed only months later.
11:38When Britain, the supposed force of liberation and enlightenment that commanded and financed this alleged liberation,
11:48rewarded India with the Jalianwalabagh massacre.
11:53The Battle of Haifa happened.
11:55Indian soldiers fought bravely.
11:57Britain defeated the Ottoman forces.
12:00Haifa fell.
12:01And Palestine came under British occupation.
12:04Those are historical events.
12:07What came later is interpretation.
12:10And when interpretation begins changing the identity of the land,
12:15the nature of colonial power,
12:17and the political meaning of events more than a century later.
12:22We are no longer simply commemorating history.
12:26We are rewriting it.
12:28So let us return to the question with which we began.
12:31But was it really a liberation?
12:32Haifa, 1918.
12:34Liberated from whom?
12:35Liberation?
12:36Or occupation?
12:39The answer should not be determined by today's political alliances, nor by slogans.
12:45It should be determined by the historical record, by the documents, by the names carved into the memorials,
12:52and by the truth of the time in which these events actually occurred.
12:58Political realities can change the present.
13:01They cannot change the past.
13:04And facts on the ground do not rewrite historical facts.
13:09The number of words can change the past.
13:10It usually is called that.
13:27After a long time, the historical outcomes has changed the past.
13:37At the time, the historical outcomes have changed the past.
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