Australia's Military in Israel's History
There is a long chain of Australia’s military involvement in the Middle East during the 20th century – and more recently in the 21st – which links at least four turning points in the history of Zionism and Israel. The first three are not that widely known amongst Australian Jews themselves – they certainly aren’t on the syllabus of too many of our Jewish day schools -- and even less amongst other Jews or Israelis. But they deserve to be better known. The first turning point was the dramatic and successful charge of the Australian Light Horse cavalry in 1917 against the entrenched Turkish guns at Beersheba. Although that victory charge has been the subject of at least two full-length Australian movies and many documentaries, the Zionist connection is hardly ever made. But in taking Beersheba against the odds, the Aussies opened the way for Britain’s General Allenby to force the Turks out of Gaza, capture Jaffa and, eventually, go on to take Jerusalem. Beersheba, however, had been the key. Turkey lost control of Palestine. Britain acquired the mandate. And the Zionists, armed with the Balfour Declaration, embarked on their own saga. In World War 2, some 24,000 Australian troops of the 7th and 9th Divisions were amongst the allies –British, Polish, and Indian- who, as the “Rats of Tobruk”, helped stop Rommel and the advancing German army in North Africa. If Rommel had broken through beyond Egypt, and this was always a military possibility, the fate of the Jews in Palestine, the yishuv, does not bear thinking about. The third turning point was in the first Gulf War in 1991, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and launched his Scud missiles against Israel. With the knowledge and co-operation of the Hawke government, the joint Australian-American satellite tracking installation at Pine Gap in Western Australia picked up and transmitted to the Israelis the tell-tale emissions of Iraqi Scud launch countdowns and firings. This information relayed in real time gave Israeli defence authorities vital minutes to plot the probable impact areas and warn the population to take to the shelters and sealed rooms. The fourth and the most recent involvement, with the SAS’ bold achievements in Iraq’s Western Desert in the early days of the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the “coalition of the willing”, had some news coverage, and Israel’s leaders publicly thanked Australia. But there’s much more. Based on the intriguing reports which circulated amongst Pentagon sources and were partially leaked in Washington, the full and heroic story of how the SAS neutralized the Iraqi SCUDS capability and so contributed to Israel’s security waits to be told.
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