New Delhi: The Embassy of the State of Palestine to India has issued a sharply worded position paper challenging what it describes as Israeli efforts to rewrite the history of the 1918 Battle of Haifa, rejecting the characterisation of the British capture of the Palestinian city as a “liberation” and warning that such a narrative distorts both Palestinian and Indian historical experience.
In a five-page document dated June 9, the embassy expressed growing concern over annual commemorations that frame Indian soldiers who fought under British command as liberators of Haifa. These commemorations, it noted, began nearly a century after the battle itself and are presented by Israel as evidence of a “shared history” between India and a state that did not exist until 1948.
“Palestine and India share a long history of friendship, mutual respect and common values,” the paper stated. “It is in this spirit that we raise a matter of particular importance and sensitivity: Israel’s characterization of the British occupation of Palestine and the Palestinian city ‘HAIFA’ as its ‘liberation,’ and its attempts to embed this characterization in Indian discourse.”
Before 1918, the embassy recalled, Palestine formed part of the Ottoman Empire, as did the rest of the Levant. During the First World War, British forces defeated Ottoman troops and brought the territory under military occupation. Soldiers from British India participated in the campaign, including the cavalry charge by the Jodhpur Lancers that captured the fortified town of Haifa. Yet the Republic of India did not exist as a sovereign state at the time. Indian soldiers served under British command within the structures of the British Empire and had no independent authority to decide on the invasion or occupation of Palestine.
British military and parliamentary sources of the period, the paper emphasised, consistently described the operations in terms of “capture,” “take,” “fall” and “conquer.” After the conquest, the territory was administered under the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (OETA) until a civil administration replaced it on 1 July 1920. This terminology aligned with the contemporary law of armed conflict governing belligerent occupation under the Hague Regulations of 1907. “Palestine was treated as enemy territory captured by Allied forces and placed under military occupation,” the embassy wrote.
The Israeli framing of the battle as “liberation of Haifa” therefore raises a fundamental question, the paper argued: liberation from whom? The historical record does not establish Ottoman rule as a foreign occupation from which Palestinians sought or requested British intervention. Accepting the British occupation as a liberation, it continued, would open the door to a broader re-characterisation of Britain’s colonial role, including in India itself. “The same British Empire cannot logically be characterized as a colonial power in India while being retrospectively transformed into a ‘liberation force’ when its army entered Palestine.”
Official Indian sources, the embassy noted, do not employ the language of liberation. The 2014 publication Indian War Memorials Around the World states that “the fortified town of Haifa fell to a cavalry charge by the Jodhpur Lancers” and that the 15th Imperial Service Cavalry Brigade “broke through and took the town.” Inscriptions on the Teen Murti Memorial in New Delhi, established under British colonial rule to honour Indian soldiers who died in the First World War, make no reference to the “liberation of Haifa.” The memorial lists campaigns across the region, including the Suez Canal, Gaza, Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley, Damascus, Aleppo and Haifa, and explicitly records connections with “Palestine and some of its cities.”
The selective focus on Haifa is itself problematic, the paper argued. Official Indian records document significant Indian sacrifices across historical Palestine: 491 soldiers at Ramleh War Cemetery, 109 at the Gaza and Deir el Balah War Cemeteries, and 47 at the Haifa Indian Cemetery, with more than 4,000 Indian soldiers recorded as having laid down their lives in the wider region. Singling out Haifa assigns a unique meaning not attached to the other campaigns and risks diminishing the broader sacrifice while constructing an artificial historical bond with Israel.
The first formal Israeli public commemoration of the Indian soldiers took place only in 2010, nearly a century after the battle. The embassy questioned why the narrative centres on Indian cavalry while largely omitting Britain’s decisive role as the financing, arming and commanding power. It further highlighted the later contradiction that Zionist armed organisations fought the British Mandate as an occupation of the Land of Israel, carrying out attacks against British forces that the British authorities themselves described as terrorism.
The paper placed the events within the colonial system that deployed hundreds of thousands of soldiers from across the British Empire. Despite their sacrifices, Indian soldiers returned to a colonial order that responded with the Rowlatt Act and, months later, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Honouring their courage, the embassy argued, should not obscure the injustice they themselves endured as subjects of colonial rule.
It also recalled the position of Indian political leadership under Mahatma Gandhi, who stated that “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English,” and noted that India voted against UN Resolution 181, which allocated Haifa to the proposed Jewish state. Framing the 1918 battle as a liberation that forms the foundation for India-Israel historical ties, the paper suggested, risks associating Indian soldiers with the broader sequence of events that led from British occupation through the Mandate to the establishment of Israel and the Nakba of the Palestinian people.
“Changing realities on the ground cannot justify rewriting history,” the embassy concluded. A historically grounded reading should reflect Haifa’s status at the time as a Palestinian city and recognise that the battles took place on Palestinian land within the context of British military occupation, rather than portraying them as an act of liberation or as the basis for invented historical ties between Israel and India.
The position paper was issued with full respect for the sacrifice and memory of Indian soldiers and for India’s sovereign right to commemorate its history. It invited careful and scholarly reflection on the terminology associated with the Battle of Haifa so that historical remembrance remains grounded in accuracy, balance and respect for the experiences of all concerned. The embassy stressed that the document should be read in its entirety and within its full historical and legal context, and affirmed its openness to constructive dialogue based on scholarship, mutual respect and historical truth.
