The warnings from a tense Anzac Day

It is surely an incontestable fact that words will land with much more gravity if they are delivered just before the sun rises on Anzac Day on the shores of Gallipoli to an expectant, hushed crowd of New Zealand and Australian pilgrims. So it was when Foreign Minister Winston Peters spoke at this year’s dawn service. Along with the familiar sentiments about the sacrifices made in 1915, our fraternal relationship with Australia and the bond we forged with Turkey, there was a warning.

Peters said that “we live in a troubled world, the worst in memory”. A more divided world has emerged from the global pandemic, and the “regional instabilities and the chaos they create threaten the security of too many”.

There are those who say Anzac Day should not be used to make contemporary points, such is its near-sacred status in both New Zealand and Australia.

But Peters’ comments were entirely appropriate. We should not make the mistake of thinking war is historically distant from us and remote, or that wars are somehow unconnected to everyday politics.

But what should New Zealand do? Peters cited his namesake, Winston Churchill, who said meeting jaw to jaw is better than meeting war to war. Churchill was making a case for diplomacy and de-escalation in the context of US tensions with the Soviet Union, nearly 40 years after Gallipoli.

In the present day, the quote is vague enough to be a general principle about preferring peace to war. But it is impossible not to see it in relation to Peters’ repeated calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state.

If the reference was to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the time for “jaw to jaw” has long passed.

The language of “war to war” is the only one Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to understand, as even US Republicans finally recognise.

It was also an unusually dramatic Anzac Day at home, and not just because the Wellington wind defeated the National Anzac Day Commemoration Service at Pukeahu National War

Memorial Park.

Anti-war protesters in Wellington, Christchurch, Nelson, Hamilton and Auckland targeted fountains, turning the water blood red. In some cases, protesters went further, using graffiti and stencils to call for a free Gaza and an end to New Zealand’s role in the international response against Houthi attacks in the Red Sea.

Not all the graffiti was quite as relevant. A defaced statue of Captain Cook in Christchurch looked like collateral damage. Cook had barely recovered from an attack in February.

But another message held greater meaning.

That one told passers-by to “look up Surafend”, a reference to a notorious incident in Palestine at the end of World War I, when around 40 Arab civilians were killed in a raid by New Zealand, Australian and British soldiers. None of the soldiers were ever tried or punished. The incident is loaded with history. Surafend became part of Israel in 1948 and is now known as Tzrifin.

If we are to set aside a day on which to commemorate our role in foreign wars, we should not be surprised or outraged if the same day becomes a platform to talk about Gaza.

Some historians see the Surafend massacre as an example of “how New Zealand troops played a part in setting in motion the cycle of violence that continues today in Palestine and Israel”. But historian Terry Kinloch, writing at the official World War I website, believes the deplorable incident does not tarnish New Zealand’s otherwise honourable wartime record.

Either way, the Surafend incident is illustrative of the way in which Anzac Day cannot be sealed off from present-day conflicts, especially those that have their origins in the same era. If we are to set aside a day on which to commemorate our role in foreign wars, we should not be surprised or outraged if the same day becomes a platform to talk about Gaza. Our historical stories and our responses to them evolve through time, just as interest in Anzac Day has waxed and waned over the decades on both sides of the Tasman.

In the same way that the mass protests against Israel on US university campuses are strongly reminiscent of student mobilisations against the Vietnam war in the 1960s, this year’s Anzac Day actions remind us that April 25 was the obvious focus of the anti-Vietnam war movement in New Zealand in the same era. In Australia in the 1970s and 80s, feminists used Anzac Day to draw attention to women raped in all wars.

To say this is wrong is to reinforce the paradox in that classic line from the black comedy Dr Strangelove. “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the war room.”