India, Sept. 20 -- For too long, we have asked whose war it was. Perhaps it is time to ask whose dead they were. And the answer is simple and direct: they were Indians.

For nearly a century, the Battle of Haifa remained largely a regimental memory among the Jodhpur and Mysore Lancers. Families of soldiers who fought in the battle remembered it. But somewhere along the way, the battle was forgotten in the larger Indian public imagination or, in some cases, never learned of. Today, we see that changing. As such, the interesting question before us today is not simply what happened at Haifa on September 23, 1918, when the Indian Army liberated Haifa, but what changed today so that India has now begun to remember Haifa differently. The answer...