A withdrawal is orderly while a retreat is disorderly.

“Guts” is right, Harry.
As George Orwell said many years ago, ” During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”

The above article would most likely be only superficially described and discussed by the public media. Apart from illustrating the heroic deeds by the ANZACS it would be of great interest and probably surprise to many to discover that the neglected,useless land, ignored and unused by the members of the Ottoman Empire, was purchased for huge sums by the Kibbutzim and converted into fertile and productive territory to form the basics of the future country of Israel.

I wonder if any newspaper would have the guts to publish this with the
possibility of offending the ” Palestinians “

The new (Ottoman Turk) rulers utterly neglected the Land, allowing numerous deposits of stagnant water swamps to be created, which formed ideal breeding reservoirs for the mosquitoes which made human life impossible in most of the Land.
Hence, when the Zionist pioneers began to reclaim the Land, many of them succumbed to the disease, and many others were unable to withstand the challenge, and left.

Arab and Turkish absentee owners of the ostensibly worthless swamplands sold them at exorbitant prices to the Jewish National Fund, which apportioned parcels to various Zionist kibbutzim, moshavim etc, and these idealists drained the swamps and converted them into productive food-producing land. The resulting revolutionary improvement in the quality of life and standard of living in the Land attracted to it many thousands of Arabs and other Muslims from economically depressed areas as far away as Egypt, Sudan and Bosnia. The evidence of these Arab / Muslim settlers’ migration exists today in the family names of many of the Arabs who call themselves “Palestinians”:
Masri, Bosniak, Suweydani etc.

The ANZAC troops, particularly those who sojourned in the hellish hyper-malarial Jordan Valley, adopted a number of methods to mitigate the malarial scourge, with a fairly high degree of success, though many still succumbed to the disease.

In Jerusalem in 2013, a scientific conference on malaria was held, where, among others, a presentation was delivered about the ANZAC malaria experience in The Land of Israel.

The ANZAC effort did, indeed, make an enormous contribution to the liberation of the Land from the Ottoman Empire, and that victory, in turn, helped to create the conditions for the reconstitution of the Israelite / Jewish nation-state.
The State of Israel honours the memory of those ANZACS in a number of ways.

It is instructive to read the numerous testimonies regarding the condition of the Land in the pre-Zionist eras:
“Cook’s Tourist Handbook for Palestine and Syria,” published by Thomas Cook and Son in 1876, e.g., states:

” The general character of …Palestine..is no longer what it was before eighteen centuries of war and ruin and neglect has passed over it.
Above all other countries in the world…it is now a land of ruins. In Judea it is hardly an exaggeration to say that .. for miles and miles there is no appearance of present life or habitation…”