Gaza is surely now among the internet’s most recognisable words, for obvious reasons. It used to be far less familiar to Australians. Up to about 1948, if they knew it at all it was as the place where the Biblical blinded Samson pulled down the temple, or where the Light Horse fought in 1917 to carry the British empire’s war against the Ottomans from Sinai into Palestine. In 1943, Australians serving in the 9th Division fresh from their victory at El Alamein paraded there proudly, before returning to fight the Japanese.

With the creation of the state of Israel and the eviction or exodus of Palestinian Arabs, Gaza became one of the region’s largest refugee settlements, a source of further friction between Israel and its Arab neighbours and especially the Palestinian Arabs who seek redress for the loss of their homeland in the course of restoring the ancestral homeland of the Jews.

As the world knows all too well, Gaza has been bombarded seemingly indiscriminately by Israeli forces for a hundred days, causing the deaths and wounding of more than 20,000 civilians. The inhabitants of densely populated Gaza have been forced from their homes, many of which have been destroyed, in a military campaign which has aroused widespread international condemnation, and equally vociferously defended by Israel’s supporters.

Few Australians know that Gaza is the location of a large war cemetery dating originally from 1917 and completed by 1920 and now containing some 3600 graves. It originally held the........

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