The Return of the Native: Indigeneity, Settler-Colonialism and the Multiple Ironies in Israeli-Australian Commemorative Narrative of the Palestine Campaign

Volume 10|Issue 39| Winter 2022 |Articles

Abstract

At the end of the 2010s, Israel sought to align itself with a range of Indigenous struggles to both conceal the ongoing nature of settler-colonialism and to attempt to position the Zionist-state project as an indigenous one. This paper examines one instance of this trend, in the recent commemorative events surrounding the centenary of the “Palestine Campaign”, a military campaign fought by Australian soldiers in World War I. The paper argues that official Israeli commemoration of this campaign, and the recent foregrounding of the role of Aboriginal servicemen in it, was a cynical strategy of the Israel state, whose design is ultimately to occlude the Palestinian narrative and indigeneity in their ancestral lands.

Download Article Download Issue Cite this Article Subscribe for a year Cite this Article

Lecturer in the History of Ideas at Trinity College, The University of Melbourne, Australia. She obtained a PhD from the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the same university in 2015. She has published on comparative Israeli and Australian settler identities, the settler-state’s treatment of its others, and contemporary resistance strategies in Palestine.

× Citation/Reference
Arab Center
Harvard
APA
Chicago