The First World War in Gaza and the Battle for Palestine
The oasis of Gaza — the last outpost before the Sinai desert — has for thousands of years been a strategic objective for conquerors of all kinds. Any Middle Eastern empire had to control Gaza in order to confront Egypt, and any campaign towards the Nile Valley had to be launched westward from Gaza. From Alexander the Great in 332 bc to the Ottomans in 1516, control of Gaza was a prerequisite for confronting Egypt.
Any power ruling Egypt had to control Gaza in order to break through Palestine and the wider Levant, which is why the Pharaohs, the Ptolemaic dynasty, the Mameluks and even Bonaparte in 1799 sent expeditions from Egypt to conquer Gaza, before marching north along the Mediterranean coast. The strategic road through Gaza was called ‘Horus’s Path’ by the Egyptians, ‘Via Maris’ by the Romans and the ‘Sultan’s Way’ by the Mameluks.
World War One witnessed the last clash between two empires fighting for control of Gaza as part of the struggle for Palestine and the wider Middle East. The Ottomans concluded a secret alliance in August 1914 with Germany. Sultan Mehmed V had the formal status of Caliph, but was by then the creature of the Young Turks, who devised with Berlin a baroque version of ‘jihad made in Germany’: the Caliph would declare jihad against the French, British and Russian ‘infidels’, while German agents would disseminate this declaration in Arabic, Persian and Urdu, hoping to foment trouble in their adversaries’ colonies.
Berlin had nevertheless overestimated the prestige of the Ottoman Caliph among non-Turkish Muslims. ‘Jihad made in Germany’ proved a flop but London was in no mood for further strategic disturbance and imposed a fully-fledged protectorate over Egypt, after thirty-two years of British domination. The Jerusalem-based Jamal Pasha sent an Ottoman army through the Sinai down to the Suez Canal. It was defeated there in February 1915 and withdrew to the relative safety of Gaza, leaving only a few Ottoman outposts in the desert peninsula.
In March 1916 General Archibald Murray assembled an Egyptian expeditionary force that comprised significant Australian and New Zealand contingents. Nine months later, the British conquest of El-Arish completed the restoration of imperial rule over Sinai. A coastal railway was built to provision the Allied troops camping at the gates of Gaza, with water pipes running across the desert from the Canal. But Murray failed miserably in two frontal assaults on Gaza, in March and April 1917, suffering more than 10,000 losses (twice as many as were inflicted on its defenders).
Murray was replaced in June, following the Battle of Arras, by General Edmund Allenby. The new commander linked up with the Arab insurgents who had conquered Aqaba and were harassing Ottoman troops in the Negev desert. (This Bedouin army was led by British advisors, notably T.E. Lawrence a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia - S.L.)
Allenby planned a coordinated assault on Gaza and Beersheba, the main oasis of the Negev. From 27-31 October, Gaza was pounded with artillery and ordinance from battleships and planes. Beersheba fell on 1 November and a week later the British army forced its way into Gaza.
The city was devastated by British bombing, but also by the Ottoman practice of destroying local buildings in order to fortify their defences, and for many years after Gaza remained a depressing and ruined ghost city. Allenby entered Gaza on 9 November, the same day the British Foreign Office announced the ‘Balfour Declaration’ endorsed a week earlier: ‘His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment of a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people’. One battle for Palestine was over in Gaza, another was about to begin.
Jean-Pierre Filiu is Professor of Middle East Studies at Sciences Po in Paris and the author of Gaza: A History.
STORMBRINGER SENDS
Dear Sean Linnane,
ReplyDeleteOccasionally you say something that I can disagree with. Not often, just sometimes and this is one of those times I disagree with you.
A thing I did not know until it was forcefully pointed out to me was that the British survivors of The Charge of The Light Brigade fame were granted tracts of land in Van Deimen's Land. They were too scary to have near you if you were a politician or an aspiring bureaucrat.Same difference.
Same thing happened in other cultures.
And when they laid down their weapons they made a lot of money.
He is dead now so I can tell you this story he told me. And I was harsh on him.
He told me of the Crimean thing, and I checked it. Some of them were making a million pound back in the days when a million pound was a lot of money. F***ing nearly unbelievable. But it is true.
When America decided to get involved with the Vietnam thing this son of Tasmanian's said he thought about it and decided because every generation of his family were warriors he would decide with whom he would fight with. The North Vietnamese paid him more money.
I asked, and he figured, that he had 'only' killed 3 Australians. I never did think to ask how many Americans he had killed. And he was only there as an adviser to the VC.
I would like to think, and I do not care if it is not, that those American blokes that rode horses in Afghanistan were inspired by those men that took Beersheba.
Kind Regards
Warfare is a fascinating subject. Despite the dubious morality of using violence to achieve personal or political aims. It remains that conflict has been used to do just that throughout recorded history.
ReplyDeleteYour article is very well done, a good read.