Why Haifa Is Now India’s Most Important Address |
There is a cemetery in Haifa, Israel, within walking distance of the city’s port. It is small and quiet, shaded by trees, and contains 44 graves. The men buried there are Indian soldiers who died in World War I, fighting under a British flag in a land most of them had never heard of, against an Ottoman army they were ordered to break. They were cavalrymen from Jodhpur and Mysore, Rajput lancers who charged enemy machine guns on horseback. Most Indians have never visited this cemetery, and most have never learned that it exists.
I grew up knowing nothing about it. I suspect most of you reading this did not either.
What follows is the story of why that cemetery matters more in April 2026 than it did in 1918 and why a single city on the Mediterranean coast has appeared, with almost eerie consistency, at every defining moment in the India-Israel relationship across more than a century.
September 23, 1918: The Charge Nobody Taught Us About
The Battle of Haifa was fought in a single afternoon.
On September 23, 1918, the 15th Imperial Service Cavalry Brigade was ordered to capture the fortified Ottoman-held city of Haifa. The brigade was composed almost entirely of Indian soldiers from the princely states: the Jodhpur Lancers, the Mysore Lancers, and detachments from Hyderabad, Patiala, and others. Their commander for the critical assault was Major Dalpat Singh Shekhawat of the Jodhpur Lancers.
What they were asked to do was, by any conventional military assessment, nearly impossible. The approach to Haifa runs through a narrow defile between the steep slopes of Mount Carmel to the south and the swift, marshy Kishon River to the north. The Ottoman defenders, reinforced by German and Austrian troops, had positioned machine guns and artillery to cover every angle of this approach. The combined Ottoman, German, and Austrian garrison numbered approximately 1,500 men with 15 cannons and several heavy machine guns.
The Jodhpur Lancers numbered around 400. They were armed with lances and swords.
At around 2 in the afternoon, they charged. The Jodhpur Lancers came under machine gun and artillery fire almost immediately. The riverbanks were swampy and threatened to bog down the horses. Major Dalpat Singh wheeled his regiment to the left, up the lower slopes of Mount Carmel, trying to find a path through. He was shot by machine gun fire during that maneuver and mortally wounded. He died the following day and was laid to rest, as one account puts it, “in the shade of an olive grove at Mount Carmel.”
They broke through the Ottoman defenses and galloped into the city, and by nightfall, Haifa had fallen. Together the two regiments captured over 1,300 prisoners, 17 artillery guns, and 11 machine guns. The Jodhpur and Mysore Lancers together had done what an army of professional soldiers with cavalry, artillery, and light armored cars had repeatedly failed to do.
Military historians call it one of the last successful cavalry charges in the history of modern warfare. The Indian Army marks September 23 every year as Haifa Day.
In New Delhi, a memorial was erected in 1922: three bronze figures of cavalrymen from Hyderabad, Mysore, and Jodhpur, standing around a white triangular obelisk. It was called Teen Murti, the Three Statues. For nearly a century, most Indians who passed it had no idea what it........