Disinformation From The Left.

Dangerously Persuasive: When Hamas unleashes terror in Southern Israel, and the State of Israel unleashes hell in retaliation, disinformation is important. Which is why, by way of example, the Instagram message released a day ago by Pere Huriwai-Seger on behalf of the Aotearoa Liberation League is important.

DISINFORMATION has been part and parcel of the political process since, well, forever. It was only in the Nineteenth Century, however, that the need to create narratives advantageous to one’s own cause, and disadvantageous to one’s opponents, gained access to technologies enabling disinformation to be communicated at great speed and on a massive scale. With the dawning of the Twentieth Century, even more startling technological innovations upped the effectiveness of disinformation by several orders of magnitude. The old adage: “A lie will be half way around the world before Truth has pulled his boots on”; became a straightforward description of reality. By the Twenty-First Century, technology had advanced to the point where the separation of truth from falsehood required the adjudication of experts – and the ability to distinguish fake expertise from the real thing.

When people talk about disinformation today, it is almost always from within a left-wing narrative framework. The villains behind the disinformation tsunami allegedly inundating the civilised world are identified as white supremacists, misogynists, transphobes, anti-vaccination zealots, and fundamentalist Christians.

In normal circumstances, the pet-hates of leftists don’t carry very much weight. Unfortunately, the life of the world stopped being normal in January 2020, as it became clear that a novel coronavirus – Covid-19 – was about to ignite a global pandemic. Fearful that the small but very vocal clusters of anti-vaccination zealots, located in just about all Western nations, would undermine the public health and immunological measures vital to fighting the virus, public servants began establishing anti-disinformation units to identify and counter the lies being spread about Covid-19, and, more importantly, the vaccines developed in record time to bring it under control.

In those countries with centre-left national and/or state governments, most particularly the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, politicians and activists moved swiftly to extend the brief of these disinformation units to encompass just about all of the Left’s pet-hates. The situation was not improved by the intervention of national security agencies alarmed at the volume of Russian and Chinese disinformation pouring onto Western social media platforms.

From the perspective of the Left, this conflation of Far-Right disinformation with the disinformation emanating from authoritarian nation states would prove to be enormously helpful. A pro-censorship position, which at least some of the mainstream media might have challenged, could now be presented as a matter of national security. In New Zealand, willingness to buy into this aspect of the anti-disinformation project was aided by the still raw memories of the Christchurch Mosque Massacres. Far-Right lies could produce deadly consequences, argued the Left. Free speech should not be considered an unqualified good, not when it empowers “bad actors”.

What the New Zealand Left – notoriously ignorant of its own, and the international movement’s history – finds it almost impossible to accept is that disinformation (or, as it was once, more honestly, known: “propaganda”) was, and is, every bit as rampant on the revolutionary left, as it was, and is, on the reactionary right. Indeed, modern disinformation/propaganda was more-or-less invented by Willi Münzenberg, a German political impresario, commissioned by the Communist International to spread the Bolshevik’s revolutionary creed across the West. Tactics we take for granted today: front organisations, activist celebrities, newspapers, magazines, plays, movies, and phonograph records – all with an easily digestible political sub-text, were Münzenberg’s inventions. In the early 1920s, the Right had nothing to match “Willi’s Wurlitzer”.

Not that the state-subsidised Disinformation Project would ever acknowledge the fact, but the effectiveness of New Zealand’s right-wing disinformers is well below that of their left-wing rivals. Better educated, more articulate, technically more proficient, and – most importantly – working with, not against, the grain of New Zealand’s official “progressive” ideology, New Zealand’s left-wing activists’ political and cultural production throws that of the Right into the shade. Their output can be found on Facebook, Instagram, X and Tik-Tok – global platforms often denied to the Right by Silicon Valley’s “progressive” billionaires. Freed from the need to hawk their ideological wares in the murky swamps of Telegram, the Left’s disinformers/propagandists have no need for false identities. Operating freely, under their own names, they have ready access to the hearts and minds of millions.

Not that very many New Zealanders know or care what the Left is saying. Indeed, political speech only becomes important in moments of national and international crisis. In the middle of a global pandemic, disinformation is important. When Russia invades Ukraine, disinformation is important. When Hamas unleashes terror in Southern Israel, and the State of Israel unleashes hell in retaliation, disinformation is important. Which is why, by way of example, the Instagram message released a day ago (22/10/23) by Pere Huriwai-Seger on behalf of the Aotearoa Liberation League (a front organisation comprised of Pere and his wife Sarah) is important.

With film-star good looks and a compelling verbal style, Pere commands the viewers attention from the moment he authoritatively disabuses them of any notion that what is currently unfolding in Gaza is not their fight. New Zealand, he informs them “has troops involved”. An alarming “fact” if one’s knowledge of New Zealand’s role in the Middle East is poor – i.e. most of the New Zealand population. That Pere flashes up a media release explaining that New Zealand has eight military personnel serving in the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation in no way excuses his claim that the country has troops involved. In the minds of his viewers his words will have conjured up images of Kiwi soldiers rubbing shoulders with members of the Israeli Defence Force. It’s misinformation shading into disinformation.

Pere’s pace is brisk, and just seconds later he is informing his viewers that New Zealand has “long supported the colonisation of Palestine”. This is historical nonsense – and malicious nonsense at that. He states as a fact that New Zealand “invaded” Palestine and “seized it for Britain” in 1917. Curiously, he neglects to inform his viewers that the New Zealand Mounted Rifles was merely one unit in the British Expeditionary Force waging war against the Ottoman Empire, of which Palestine was a mere province. According to Pere, the province was handed over to “Zionist terrorists”. Curiouser and curiouser, since Ottoman Palestine was actually handed over to the British by the League of Nations as a “mandated territory”, and remained in British hands until 1948.

But Pere is just getting warmed-up. While they were busy making Palestine safe for Zionism, argues Pere, the Kiwis treated the Palestinian people “horribly”. He cites the Surafend massacre of 1918 as proof.

What happened at Surafend wasn’t pretty, but it didn’t happen out of the blue. Troopers of the NZ Mounted Rifles and the Australian Light Horse went to the village of Surafend to secure the surrender of the Palestinian Arab who had shot dead a New Zealander, Trooper Leslie Lowry, after stealing his kit-bag. Their demand refused, the Anzacs attacked the men of the village (having evacuated the women and children to a place of safety) killing between 40 and 200 Arabs, and setting their houses on fire. The Anzac perpetrators received a tongue-lashing from the British commander, Allenby, but none of them were ever punished.

Had Pere homed-in on the Surafend massacre right from the start of his video, he could have presented a picture of New Zealand’s complicity in British, and later American, imperialism that was not only persuasive by truthful. Instead, by surrounding the Surafend massacre with a string of disinformative statements, the whole four-minute video becomes an exercise in the most blatant propaganda. And not just any propaganda, Pere’s falsehoods are the falsehoods of Hamas and their Iranian backers – whose cause Pere equates with the cause of Māori nationalism in Aotearoa. Presumably, what Hamas terrorists did to the Jewish inhabitants of Southern Israel is what decolonisation looks like.

Imagine the reaction of the Disinformation Project if they had found a video presentation promoting right-wing disinformation and hate on such a scale. A video dripping with Islamophobic hate in the same way Pere’s drips with annihilationist hatred of Israel. Such a video would have been presented to the mainstream media as evidence of the danger posed by radical political extremism; of the need to take decisive action against such horrific hate speech.

And the mainstream media would have lapped it up.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project website on Monday, 23 October 2023.

A Grim Template.

Witnesses To A Massacre? The New Zealand Mounted Field Ambulance served in Sinai and Palestine in the latter years of the First World War. What connection, if any, did it have to the bloody events at Surafend? Major Alexander M. Trotter (the author’s grandfather) is seated on the right in the second row.

I DON’T BELIEVE my grandfather participated in the Surafend Massacre, but it’s possible he treated some of the wounded. He was definitely “in theatre” at the time. That is to say he was in Palestine. Riding with the New Zealand Mounted Field Ambulance and the New Zealand Mounted Rifle Brigade alongside the Australian Light Horse. The latter two entities were up to their bloody armpits in the Surafend Massacre, but for the most part the attack was led by ordinary rank-and-file troopers – not their officers. Which is not to say that their officers didn’t look the other way when their men descended upon the little Palestinian village to avenge their mate, Trooper Lesley Lowry, tragically murdered by a Palestinian thief on 9 December 1918 – just 28 days after the war officially came to an end.

Certainly New Zealand and Australian officers remained steadfastly tight-lipped in the faces of the investigation team sent by a furious General Edmund Allenby. The British commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force demanded the identities of the troopers involved in the killing of 30 Palestinian civilians. Denied even a single name, Allenby vented his spleen on the New Zealand and Australian perpetrators. He did not mince his words:

“I was proud of you as brave soldiers but now I am ashamed of you as cold-blooded murderers.”

Allenby’s words came close to provoking a mutiny among the Australian and New Zealand troops, and he was soon forced to retract them.

The Jewish settlers of Rishon LeZion, a Zionist settlement not far from Surafend could not understand what all the fuss was about. Even in 1918 (some might say especially in 1918, barely a year since the Balfour Declaration promising the Jews a homeland in Palestine) there was no love lost between Jew and Arab.

The inhabitants of Rishon LeZion had, however, erected a memorial to the New Zealanders who had fallen twelve months earlier in the Battle of Ayun Kara. The shrewd Zionists of Rishon LeZion understood both the vital importance of freeing Palestine from Ottoman Control and how critical it was that the British Empire become the Holy Land’s new overlord. And they never forgot the New Zealanders. For many years after the First World War, the leaders of Rishon LeZion would send a Christmas message to New Zealand newspapers:

[T]he memory of the New Zealand and Australian troops, Anzac, remains carved in our hearts. You won the highest praise for your splendid valour right throughout the campaign and no less than your valour in battle was your chivalry to the people of the country.

Not a sentiment the villagers of Surafend were likely to endorse, but the Zionists of Rishon LeZion understood that the State of Israel they were so determined to build would always be in need of friends.

How disturbing it would be to discover that the destruction of Surafend by the New Zealanders and Australians in 1918 served as a grim template for what the Palestinians call the “Nakba” – those terrible days in 1948 and 1949 when Jewish militias fell upon the towns and villages of Palestinian Arabs and drove more than half-a-million of their inhabitants into exile. Without these mass expulsions – this ethnic cleansing – the State of Israel could not have been securely established.

Terror has its uses. In spite of his fury at the Surafend Massacre, General Allenby soon found it expedient to employ the New Zealand Mounted Rifles and the Australian Light Horse in quelling the anti-imperialist uprisings that erupted across British-occupied Egypt in March-April of 1919. The mere prospect of receiving a visit from the General’s Surafend “murderers” was usually sufficient to quieten-down any ungrateful and unruly wards of the King-Emperor.

Did my grandfather, a country doctor for 40 years in Herbert, North Otago, listening to news bulletins on the radio receiver he’d built himself, ever recall those long ago events? He must have known about Surafend – especially after Allenby’s outburst. His copy of Lieutenant-Colonel C. Guy Powles The New Zealanders in Sinai and Palestine is sitting on my desk as I write these words. The “disturbance” at Surafend is described. When he heard about the bitter events of May 1948, did he recall their deadly precursor of December 1918?

What were his feelings when he read those Christmas messages from Rishon LeZion in the Otago Daily Times?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 12 May 2023.

The Kiwi Connection In Palestine.

New Zealand's Collective Punishers: “I was proud of you as brave soldiers but now I am ashamed of you as cold-blooded murderers.” - Major-General Sir Edmund Allenby addressing New Zealand and Australian troops after the Surafend Massacre, December 1918.

I DON’T KNOW which is more embarrassing: to have a lawyer called Trotter defending a woman who prostituted her own daughter; or a PhD history candidate called Trotter “Exploring the Kiwi connection as Israel turns70”.

On balance, I’d have to say that the PhD history candidate is the more embarrassing of the two. That our justice system goes out of its way to ensure that every accused person is provided with effective legal representation is something of which we should all be proud. So, I doff my hat to Karl Trotter for his defence of the indefensible. To Sheree Trotter, however, I have only questions to offer – not the least of which is: How could a PhD history candidate’s description of Israel’s “Kiwi connection” not include the moving ceremony at Rishon LeZion and the brutal massacre at Surafend?

Rishon LeZion (The First of Zion) was one of those settlements involved in what was, rather quaintly, referred to as, “the upbuilding of Palestine”. On 4 November 1917, New Zealand troops had participated in the Battle of Ayun Kara, located very close to Rishon LeZion. Twelve months later, the leader of the Zionist settlement invited the New Zealanders (who were still encamped close by) to a commemorative ceremony.

The small Jewish community had erected an obelisk in memory of the New Zealanders who fell at Ayun Kara, and its Mayor had prepared a speech:

“These dead have not only fought for their country, they have planted the flag of justice and lit the torch of liberty. Its light will never be extinguished. You have placed marking stones along the route to the future. These markers, formed by your tombs, will cause those who come after to meditate: ‘It is just about a thousand years’ they will say, ‘since, on this very soil, Western lords came with the sacred flame of religion and in the name of the Cross to liberate the Holy Land from the infidel. And now, after long delay, these same children of the West have come again in their thousands, glowing with ardour, animated by the thirst for liberty, justice, and fraternity, to liberate the same country from the yoke it has borne for nearly five centuries.”

Stirring words – and they clearly left a deep impression on the Kiwis. Because, just over a month after the ceremony at Rishon LeZion, on 10 December 1918, animated no doubt by their thirst for “liberty, justice and fraternity” troopers of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade, backed by their comrades in the Australian Light Horse, inflicted a gruesome collective punishment upon the inhabitants of the Palestinian village of Surafend.

The night before, in the course of a botched robbery, a Palestinian Arab had shot and killed a New Zealand soldier, Trooper Leslie Lowry. The offender had been tracked back to Surafend and the Kiwis ordered the villagers to hand him over for punishment. When the villagers refused, the Kiwis and their Aussie mates, some 200 men altogether, marched the women and children out of the village and then proceeded to attack the men and boys who remained.

Their weapons of choice were pick-axe handles and the heavy, canvass-sheathed chains used to haul supply wagons and field guns. They swung these with deadly effect against the Arab defenders. By the time the Kiwi and Aussie troopers marched out of Surafend, by now a smoking ruin, more than 40 Palestinian Arabs had been killed or wounded.

The massacre had taken place in defiance of the Brigade’s commanders and with the connivance of more than a few junior officers. The Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force – the occupier of Palestine following the cessation of hostilities – Major-General Edmund Allenby, was furious. Forming the ANZAC’s into a hollow square he unleashed a tongue-lashing the like of which no British or Empire troops had heard for many, many years:

“I was proud of you as brave soldiers but now I am ashamed of you as cold-blooded murderers.”

This outburst aroused such mutinous resentment among the New Zealand and Australian troops that Allenby was soon forced to retract his words. In the weeks ahead, as the British tightened their grip on the former Ottoman possessions in the Middle East, they would have need of that ANZAC muscle. When the New Zealand and Australian troopers were ordered into action against protesting Arab nationalists, the dreadful reputation they had fashioned for themselves at Surafend rode ahead of them.

Thus, was the Balfour Declaration, which promised the Jews a national home in Palestine, given effect. Such, was the Kiwi connection with one of the earliest Zionist communities in Palestine. That sorrow-filled stretch of earth which would, forty years later, become the State of Israel.

The lesson imparted by those murderous Kiwi and Australian soldiers on the night of 10 December 1918 – that Palestinian Arabs could be collectively punished with impunity – was one the Zionists never forgot.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 24 April 2018.

New Zealand’s First “Revenge Raid” – Surafend, Palestine, 1918.

Troopers of the NZ Machine Gun Squadron, NZ Mounted Rifles Brigade, Palestine, 1918.

 

The shocking events described by Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson in Hit and Run: The New Zealand SAS in Afghanistan and the Meaning of Honour are not without precedent in the history of New Zealand’s military engagements overseas. In the tiny Palestinian village of Surafend, in the final days of 1918, New Zealand troops participated in what was indisputably a serious war crime. The parallels with the SAS “Revenge Raid” of August 2010 are striking. The Surafend Massacre was also sparked by the killing of a New Zealand soldier. It, too, was a  murderous “fiasco”, the details of which were kept from the New Zealand public for many years. This, as best as I can determine, is what happened.

 

 

THE WAR WAS OVER. At the eleventh hour, on the eleventh day, of the eleventh month 1918, the fighting ceased. For the men of the New Zealand Machine Gun Squadron, and all the other troopers of the New Zealand Mounted Rifle Brigade encamped among the barren sandhills of central Palestine, that single fact was all that mattered.

 

But, as the weeks passed, the war’s end, while obviously a source of immense relief, had also become the cause of intense frustration. Now that their job was done; now that the killing had stopped; now that they had survived; all these men wanted to do was go home.

 

 

WHEN Trooper Leslie Lowry pulled his kit-bag under his head on the night of 9 December 1918 it was to home that his thoughts inevitably wandered. Wrapped in his blanket to ward off the late autumn chill, he lay motionless beneath the low canvass ceiling of his tent thinking of New Zealand until, lulled by the companionable snorting of the tethered horses, he drifted off to sleep.

 

An hour later he awoke with a start to feel his kit-bag/pillow being unceremoniously yanked from under his head. He scrambled out of the tent, stumbling in the sand as he pulled on his trousers, and shouting at the top of his voice to the men on sentry duty:

 

“Stop him! Stop that little bastard – he’s stolen my kit-bag!”

 

The thief was clearly visible in the moonlight, weaving in and out of the thorn bushes that dotted the sandhills.

 

Trooper Lowry had always been a good runner and he proved it now by sprinting after his quarry like a huntaway. Within seconds he’d caught up with the man who’d stolen his property.

 

“You give that back – you thieving little swine!”

 

For a moment the New Zealander and the Palestinian faced each other, breathing heavily. In the distance both of them could hear the shouts of the alerted sentries and the alarmed whinnying of the horses.

 

“Come on mate,” said Lowry, speaking in what he hoped was a more reasonable tone, “you’re not going anywhere. Hand it over.”

 

The Palestinian said nothing. Instead, he reached into the folds of his caftan and pulled out a heavy Webly revolver, retrieved six months earlier from the corpse of a British officer. Pointing it at the New Zealander’s chest – he fired.

 

Lowry sank slowly to his knees, hands fluttering uselessly as blood spouted from the neat little hole in his chest, pouring out through his fingers and down over his bare stomach. Without a word he toppled over onto his side, an awkward, quivering bundle in the cold sand.

 

The Palestinian turned and ran off into the darkness.

 

 

THE news of trooper Lowry’s death spread rapidly – and its effect was devastating. For a man to have come through everything the NZ Mounted Rifles had endured, only to be murdered by an Arab thief just weeks before sailing for home, was almost too much for his comrades to bear.

 

“He was unarmed for Christ’s sake! The thief must have seen that. What kind of man calmly shoots an unarmed man, at point-blank range, for the sake of a bloody kit-bag?”

 

“We’re not going to take this lying down – I don’t care what the Heads say. This is too bloody much. Come on you blokes, it should be easy enough to track the bastard through all this sand. Look! – there are his footprints!

 

“You three, go back and round up the rest of the Squadron – and see if you can get some of the Aussies from the Light Horse to join us. We’re going to track this murdering bastard back to the hole he came from and cork it up tight. Make sure he’s still there in the morning when the Red-Caps arrive.”

 

The thief’s footprints led the New Zealanders and their Australian allies across the sand to the nearby Palestinian village of Surafend. Within the hour they had set up a tight military cordon around the cluster of stone houses: no one was permitted to enter or leave.

 

 

THE morning light came slanting down into the village of Surafend and illuminated the faces of the New Zealand and Australian troopers encircling it. But the rising sun brought no Military Police. Indeed, having being informed of the murder of Trooper Lowry and the situation at Surafend by the Australian and New Zealand Divisional Commander, Major-General Edward Chaytor, General Headquarters had peremptorily ordered the cordon lifted. There would be no official investigation, no Red Caps, no arrests. By the afternoon of 10 December all the troopers who had surrounded Surafend were back behind their tent-lines, allowing a steady stream of Palestinian men to make their way out of the village without hindrance.

 

Trooper Lowry’s comrades were furious.

 

“I don’t believe this – I simply don’t believe this! How can the bloody British just sit there, knowing that a soldier of the Empire has been murdered, and do nothing about it?”

 

“You know the Heads. There’ll be some behind-the-scenes skulduggery between the British and that Arab king Lawrence has been squiring around. The last thing they want is any ‘unpleasantness’ – nothing to upset the ‘delicate diplomacy’ between His Majesty’s Government and the leaders of the Arab tribes. What’s one Kiwi digger’s life compared to ‘the future of the Middle East?’”

 

“It’s just like that bloody fiasco at Ain Es Sir – remember? When our lot were sent back to help the Circassians and the ungrateful little bastards ambushed us. Nobody did anything about the men they killed there either.”

 

“Well that’s not going to happen this time. I’ve been talking to the men. They’re ready to do something on their own. And there’s a swag of blokes in the Light Horse who’ll join us. The Aussies are as sick of this turning a blind eye to theft and murder as we are. I hear there’s even a few Brits willing to do their bit.”

 

“Do what?”

 

“We’re going to pay the village of Surafend a little visit. And if they refuse to hand over the bastard who shot Les, we’ll administer some justice of our own – ANZAC-style.”

 

 

THERE was fear in the eyes of the women, children and old men of Surafend as they were assembled in front of the village well. These strange men from distant lands said little, but their gestures were clear enough. Holding the pick-axe handles they were carrying with both hands, they pushed and prodded the little huddle in the direction they wanted them to travel – out of the village and up into the sandhills. One of the old men pleaded with his grim shepherds.

 

“We are friends,” he cried in heavily accented English, “friends of the British.”

 

“You may be friends of the British,” hissed one of the troopers, pushing the old man back into the huddle, “but you’re no friends of ours.”

 

“Keep them well back!” Someone shouted. “Well back.”

 

From the crest of the big sandhill overlooking Surafend, the little huddle watched as around 200 troopers closed in on their homes. In addition to pick-axe handles, the New Zealanders and Australians were armed with the heavy, canvass-sheathed chains used to haul supply wagons and field guns. They were eerily silent, and the expressions their faces wore were hard – very hard.

 

“We want the man who shot Trooper Leslie Lowry.” The leader of the troopers was speaking slowly and very clearly to the village headman. “We tracked him to this village. If he’s not here, we want to know where we can find him. Lead us to him, now, and nothing will happen to you and your people. Refuse, and ….” The trooper cast a meaningful glance at the mute formation drawn up behind him.”

 

The Palestinian looked into the eyes of the New Zealander standing before him. Neither man moved a muscle. Then, drawing himself up to his full height, the headman leaned forward to within a few inches of the New Zealander’s face, and speaking in a clear voice so all the men of his village could hear, he said:

 

“Get your infidel dogs out of my village!”

 

And spat in the trooper’s face.

 

A roar, deep and guttural, leapt from the throats of all the men present, and both sides lunged towards the other. The troopers swung their pick-axe handles high and brought them down with deadly force. The heavy chains hissed and whistled. The air was filled with the sickening sound of wood and metal connecting with human bone and tissue. Men screamed, fell, and lay still, but still the Palestinians continued to hurl themselves upon the troopers.

 

“Allahu Akbar! They cried. “God is Great!”

 

“Get them! Get the bastards!” Shouted the troopers.

 

From a distance it was all-too-clear how the fight would end. The villagers were outnumbered and the troopers superior training and discipline easily overcame their furious resistance. Slowly, methodically, the New Zealanders and the Australians beat and beat and beat. The pick-axe handles rising and falling like some vast threshing machine.

 

Soon the village was ablaze. The contents of the stone-walled houses burned fiercely, bathing the whole scene in a lurid glow. As their men fell, the women up on the sandhill began a high keening. The children, seeing the fathers and brothers being beaten to death, sobbed uncontrollably.

 

By the time the troopers tired of their grim sport, thirty Palestinian men lay dead or wounded on the bloody sand. As the rising wind swirled the smoke and cinders into the night sky, the New Zealanders and Australians formed up in ranks and, without a backward glance, marched out into the darkness of the sandhills.

 

The village of Surafend had ceased to exist.

 

 

NO New Zealand or Australian soldier was ever charged as a result of the Surafend Massacre. The British High Command was furious at what could only be considered a diplomatic disaster in terms of the British Empire’s relations with the Arab peoples.

 

The borders of the Middle East were in the process of being redrawn, and the gentlemen at the Foreign and Colonial Office in London were determined that this process should not rebound to the Empire’s disadvantage.

 

There can be little doubt that the military authorities would very much have liked to punish the ringleaders, but the troopers and the junior officers of the NZ Mounted Rifles and the Australian Light Horse closed ranks against all investigation.

 

In the end it was left to the British Commander-in-Chief, Major-General Edmund Allenby, to state the views of His Majesty’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force. Forming the ANZAC’s into a hollow square he unleashed a tongue-lashing the like of which no British or Empire troops had heard for many, many years:

 

“I was proud of you as brave soldiers but now I am ashamed of you as cold-blooded murderers.”

 

This outburst aroused such mutinous resentment among the New Zealand and Australian troops that Allenby was soon forced to retract his words.

 

It was a necessary concession because with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the US President, Woodrow Wilson’s, promise of “self-determination” for the world’s subject peoples, the British soon had their hands full keeping the Arab population of the region from breaking out into full scale rebellion. In this task the brutal reputation of the Australian and New Zealand troopers rode before them, striking fear into the hearts of the Arab population wherever they appeared.

 

 

UNFORTUNATELY, there was no Nicky Hager, no Jon Stephenson, to write an exhaustive account of the Surafend tragedy for the New Zealand public of 1918. Bill Massey’s deeply authoritarian government, having expended the blood of thousands of young New Zealanders in the cause of Britain’s empire, was not about to sanction a full and independent investigation into a war crime perpetrated by his own troops. As far as Massey’s stridently imperialistic government was concerned, the “boys” of the New Zealand Mounted Rifle Brigade were heroes – blameless heroes.

 

The closest “official” New Zealand ever came to acknowledging the Surafend Massacre was in the bare summary of the event written by, Lieutenant-Colonel C. Guy Powles, author of The New Zealanders in Sinai and Palestine, the third volume of the Official History of New Zealand’s Effort in the Great War, published by the New Zealand Government in 1922.

 

Of the bloody evening of 10 December 1918, Powles writes:

 

“While the brigade was camped in the vicinity of Richon le Zion a disturbance occurred in the divisional area following the murder of a New Zealander, during which a village and an Arab camp were burned and some 30 Arabs killed and injured ….. It appears that the murdered man’s comrades, feeling aggrieved that the murderer was not immediately brought to book, went to the village and demanded his surrender. They were met by an insolent answer from the head man of the village so they determined to find him and the searching of the houses led to a collision with the natives which resulted in a riot.”

 

Powles also notes, drily: “[A]t the [subsequent] inquiry it was found impossible to get any evidence as to who took part in the disturbance.”

 

Then, as now, the New Zealand military authorities preferred to bury their mistakes beneath a crushing mountain of official silence.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 22 March 2017.

New Zealand’s Only Middle Eastern Exit Strategy – Leave Now.

Kiwi Boots On The Ground: To Arab eyes, New Zealand’s continuing presence in Iraq must signal a depressingly familiar message. Since the late-nineteenth century, this country has happily marched in the long imperial columns that have trudged their way across the dry and dusty places of the world.

 

WHY ARE NEW ZEALAND TROOPS in the Middle East? Our soldiers have been there for so long we’re in danger of forgetting why we sent them in the first place. And, since New Zealand’s contribution can only ever be token, what is this country’s apparently permanent presence in the world’s most dangerous region intended to communicate?

 

To Arab eyes, New Zealand’s presence must signal a depressingly familiar message. Since the late-nineteenth century, this country has happily marched in the great expeditionary columns that have trudged their way across the dry and dusty places of the world. From the South African veldt to the Sinai desert, the Kiwis’ broad-brimmed hats have dutifully bobbed along behind the pith helmets of their Imperial British mentors.

 

Numerous speeches have been delivered this year commemorating the grievous loss of young New Zealanders in the muck and fury of France and Flanders during the First World War. The Defence Minister, Gerry Brownlee, was in France only recently intoning the doleful register of our sacrifices at the Battle of the Somme. Not as much is being said, however, about the considerably less muddy and bloody exploits of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles in what was then the Ottoman Empire.

 

All New Zealanders know about their country’s role in the invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915. Less well known is the role that Kiwis and Aussies played in driving the British Lion’s blood-stained claws into the carcass of the Ottoman Empire’s Middle Eastern provinces – especially Palestine – between 1916 and 1918.

 

The New Zealand Government’s reticence about drawing Arab attention to the role this country played in the emergence of the State of Israel is entirely understandable. What purpose would be served by reminding Arab historians about the Kiwi and Aussie troops responsible for the deaths of more than 200 Palestinian men and boys in the tiny village of Surafend in 1918? Or about the fulsome vote of thanks delivered to the Antipodeans by residents of the nearby Jewish settlement of Richon Le Zion?

 

Dredging up these historical incidents might prompt Egyptian historians to investigate the role played by the New Zealand and Australian mounted infantry in suppressing the Egyptian nationalist revolt against British domination which exploded in the final months of 1918 – a task made much easier by the Antipodeans’ already fearsome reputation for brutality against Arab civilians.

 

Questions might be asked about whether or not New Zealand’s behavior towards the Islamic world has changed all that much over the course of the past 100 years. True, the British Empire is no longer the dominant global superpower, but its American successor would appear to be no less persuasive when it comes to drawing the Antipodeans back into the marching columns of imperial adventures.

 

Indeed, if Nicky Hager’s book “Other People’s Wars” is to be believed, members of the NZ Defence Force were more-or-less begging the Americans to allow them to participate in the pacification of Afghanistan following the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Perhaps it was this country’s soldiers’ enthusiasm to get back in the imperial game that prompted US Secretary of State Colin Powell to inform the world that the USA and New Zealand had, once again, become “very, very, very good friends”?

 

The only serious diplomatic spanner which New Zealand has ever dropped into the works of her imperial allies was the one let slip by Helen Clark in 2003. The Fifth Labour Government’s refusal to invade Iraq without the approval of the United Nation’s Security Council did not go unnoticed by the Arab world. For the first time in its history, New Zealand had declined to join its traditional allies: Australia, Britain and the USA; in a military enterprise. It could have marked the beginning of a new era in this country’s foreign affairs and defence policies. Sadly, it was not to be. Clark’s government was soon “persuaded” to step back into the dry and dusty places of the world.

 

Where, it would appear, we intend to stay. New Zealanders were assured that our assistance to the Iraqi government came with a clear exit strategy. Our troops would be engaged in training the Iraqi army – nothing more. But now, the “mission creep” historically inseparable from these ostensibly limited engagements has our government contemplating extending the NZDF’s training role to the Iraqi police. The Guardian newspaper is, further, reporting the involvement of our Special Air Service in combat operations against Islamic State. These claims have been strenuously rejected by John Key. But then he would say that – wouldn’t he?

 

To the peoples of the Middle East, the first step towards securing peace in the region is extremely simple: the nations of the West must leave. That includes New Zealand. We have aided and abetted the forces of imperialism for far too long. It’s time to go.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, November 01, 2016.

Palestine: The Kiwi Connection

Kiwi Crusaders: Images of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles campaign in Palestine, 1917-19. (Photomontage by the NZMR Association)

Following TVNZ's account of the so-called "Surafend Massacre", which was broadcast on the Sunday programme of 22 November, I've been moved to post this "docu-drama" style account of the event written by myself back in January, shortly after the Israeli incursion into Gaza.
 

THE WAR WAS OVER. On the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month, 1918, the fighting ceased. For the men of the New Zealand Machine Gun Squadron, and all the other troopers of the New Zealand Mounted Rifle Brigade encamped among the barren sandhills of central Palestine, that single fact was all that mattered.

But, as the weeks passed, the war’s end, while obviously a source of immense relief, had also become the cause of intense frustration. Now that their job was done; now that the killing had stopped; now that they had survived; all these men wanted to do was go home.

　
WHEN TROOPER Leslie Lowry pulled his kit-bag under his head on the night of 9 December 1918 it was to home that his thoughts inevitably wandered. Wrapped in his blanket to ward off the late autumn chill, he lay motionless beneath the low canvass ceiling of his tent thinking of New Zealand until, lulled by the companionable snorting of the tethered horses, he drifted off to sleep.

An hour later he awoke with a start to feel his kit-bag/pillow being unceremoniously yanked from under his head. He scrambled out of the tent, stumbling in the sand as he pulled on his trousers, and shouting at the top of his voice to the men on sentry duty:

"Stop him! Stop that little bastard – he’s stolen my kit-bag!"

The thief was clearly visible in the moonlight, weaving in and out of the thorn bushes that dotted the sandhills.

Trooper Lowry had always been a good runner and he proved it now by sprinting after his quarry like a huntaway. Within seconds he’d caught up with the man who’d stolen his property.

"You give that back – you thieving little swine!"

For a moment the New Zealander and the Palestinian faced each other, breathing heavily. In the distance both of them could hear the shouts of the alerted sentries and the alarmed whinnying of the horses.

"Come on mate," said Lowry, speaking in what he hoped was a more reasonable tone, "you’re not going anywhere. Hand it over."

The Palestinian said nothing. Instead, he reached into the folds of his caftan and pulled out a heavy Webly revolver, retrieved six months earlier from the corpse of a British officer. Pointing it at the New Zealander’s chest – he fired.

Lowry sank slowly to his knees, hands fluttering uselessly as blood spouted from the neat little hole in his chest, pouring out through his fingers and down over his bare stomach. Without a word he toppled over onto his side, an awkward, quivering bundle in the cold sand.

The Palestinian turned and ran off into the darkness.

　
THE NEWS of trooper Lowry’s death spread rapidly – and its effect was devastating. For a man to have come through everything the NZ Mounted Rifles had endured, only to be murdered by an Arab thief just weeks before sailing for home, was almost too much for his comrades to bear.

"He was unarmed for Christ’s sake! The thief must have seen that. What kind of man calmly shoots an unarmed kid, at point-blank range, for the sake of a bloody kit-bag?"

"We’re not going to take this lying down – I don’t care what the Heads say. This is too bloody much. Come on you blokes, it should be easy enough to track the bastard through all this sand. Look! – there are his footprints!

"You three, go back and round up the rest of the Squadron – and see if you can get some of the Aussies from the Light Horse to join us. We’re going to track this murdering bastard back to the hole he came from and cork it up tight. Make sure he’s still there in the morning when the Red-Caps arrive."

The thief’s footprints led the New Zealanders and their Australian allies across the sand to the nearby Palestinian village of Surafend. Within the hour they had set up a tight military cordon around the cluster of stone houses: no one was permitted to enter or leave.

"I’ve heard about this damned place", muttered one of the troopers, "those Jews from down the road at Rishon LeZion are certain that most of the attacks on their settlements come from this village. I reckon these Palestinian Arabs hate Johnny Jew more than they do Johnny Turk."

"Yeah, well it’s no secret that Lawrence and his Arab friends were none too fussy about abiding by the ‘Rules of War’. From what I hear they travelled pretty light – if you know what I mean."

"No prisoners?"

"Exactly."

"Rules of bloody war – that’s a good one. Killing’s a dirty business, and the only rule I know of that rings true is: get the other fellow before he gets you."

"And look after your mates."

"Yeah, that’s right – and look after your mates."

"Ah, but we’re supposed to be following in the footsteps of the Crusaders. Remember what that little chap from Rishon LeZion said to old Meldrum at the anniversary of the Battle of Ayun Kara?"

The address of the Mayor of the little Jewish settlement was intended to be memorable. Indeed, the entire population of Rishon LeZion ("The First of Zion") had been marched out to the nearby battlefield to hear it. Standing in front of the little obelisk his people had erected to mark where the fallen of the NZ Mounted Rifle Brigade lay buried, the Jewish leader offered verbal tribute to Brigadier-General William Meldrum and his men.

These dead have not only fought for their country, they have planted the flag of justice and lit the torch of liberty. Its light will never be extinguished. You have placed marking stones along the route to the future. These markers, formed by your tombs, will cause those who come after to meditate: ‘It is just about a thousand years’ they will say, ‘since, on this very soil, Western lords came with the sacred flame of religion and in the name of the Cross to liberate the Holy Land from the infidel. And now, after long delay, these same children of the West have come again in their thousands, glowing with ardour, animated by the thirst for liberty, justice, and fraternity, to liberate the same country from the yoke it has borne for nearly five centuries.’

　
THE MORNING LIGHT came slanting down into the village of Surafend and illuminated the faces of the New Zealand and Australian troopers encircling it. But the rising sun brought no Military Police. Indeed, having being informed of the murder of Trooper Lowry and the situation at Surafend by the Australian and New Zealand Divisional Commander, Major-General Edward Chaytor, General Headquarters had peremptorily ordered the cordon lifted. There would be no official investigation, no Red Caps, no arrests. By the afternoon of 10 December all the troopers who had surrounded Surafend were back behind their tent-lines, allowing a steady stream of Palestinian men to make their way out of the village without hindrance.

Trooper Lowry’s comrades were furious.

"I don’t believe this – I simply don’t believe this! How can the bloody British just sit there, knowing that a soldier of the Empire has been murdered, and do nothing about it?"

"You know the Heads. There’ll be some behind-the-scenes skulduggery between the British and that Arab king Lawrence has been squiring around. The last thing they want is any ‘unpleasantness’ – nothing to upset the ‘delicate diplomacy’ between His Majesty’s Government and the leaders of the Arab tribes. What’s one Kiwi digger’s life compared to ‘the future of the Middle East?’"

"It’s just like that bloody fiasco at Ain Es Sir – remember? When our lot were sent back to help the Circassians and the ungrateful little bastards ambushed us. Nobody did anything about the men they killed there either."

"Well that’s not going to happen this time. I’ve been talking to the men. They’re ready to do something on their own. And there’s a swag of blokes in the Light Horse who’ll join us. The Aussies are as sick of this turning a blind eye to theft and murder as we are. I hear there’s even a few Brits willing to their bit."

"Do what?"

"We’re going to pay the village of Surafend a little visit. And if they refuse to hand over the bastard who shot Les, we’ll administer some justice of our own – ANZAC-style."

　
THERE WAS FEAR in the eyes of the women, children and old men of Surafend as they were assembled in front of the village well. These strange men from distant lands said little, but their gestures were clear enough. Holding the pick-axe handles they were carrying with both hands, they pushed and prodded the little huddle in the direction they wanted them to travel – out of the village and up into the sandhills. One of the old men pleaded with his grim shepherds.

"We are friends," he cried in heavily accented English, "friends of the British."

"You may be friends of the bloody British," hissed one of the troopers, pushing the old man back into the huddle, "but you’re no bloody friends of ours."

"Keep them well back!" Someone shouted. "Well back."

From the crest of the big sandhill overlooking Surafend, the little huddle watched as around 200 troopers closed in on their homes. In addition to pick-axe handles, the New Zealanders and Australians were armed with the heavy, canvass-sheathed chains used to haul supply wagons and field guns. They were eerily silent, and the expressions their faces wore were hard – very hard.

"We want the man who shot Trooper Leslie Lowry." The leader of the troopers was speaking slowly and very clearly to the village headman. "We tracked him to this village. If he’s not here, we want to know where we can find him. Lead us to him, now, and nothing will happen to you and your people. Refuse, and …." The trooper cast a meaningful glance at the mute formation drawn up behind him.

The Palestinian looked into the eyes of the New Zealander standing before him. Neither man moved a muscle. Then, drawing himself up to his full height, the headman leaned forward to within a few inches of the New Zealander’s face, and speaking in a clear voice so all the men of his village could hear, he said:

"Get your infidel dogs out of my village!"

And spat in the trooper’s face.

A roar, deep and guttural, leapt from the throats of all the men present, and both sides lunged towards the other. The troopers swung their pick-axe handles high and brought them down with deadly force. The heavy chains hissed and whistled. The air was filled with the sickening sound of wood and metal connecting with human bone and tissue. Men screamed, fell, and lay still, but still the Palestinians continued to hurl themselves upon the troopers.

"Allahu Akbar! They cried. "God is Great!"

"Get them! Get the bastards!" Shouted the troopers.

From a distance it was all-too-clear how the fight would end. The villagers were outnumbered and the troopers superior training and discipline easily overcame their furious resistance. Slowly, methodically, the New Zealanders and the Australians beat and beat and beat. The pick-axe handles rising and falling like some vast threshing machine.

Soon the village was ablaze. The contents of the stone-walled houses burned fiercely, bathing the whole scene in a lurid glow. As their men fell, the women up on the sandhill began a high keening. The children, seeing the fathers and brothers being beaten to death, sobbed uncontrollably.

By the time the troopers tired of their grim sport, forty Palestinian men lay dead or wounded on the bloody sand. As the rising wind swirled the smoke and cinders into the night sky, the New Zealanders and Australians formed up in ranks and, without a backward glance, marched out into the darkness of the sandhills.

The village of Surafend had ceased to exist.

　
NO NEW ZEALAND or Australian soldier was ever charged as a result of the so-called "Surafend Massacre". The British High Command was furious at what could only be considered a diplomatic disaster in terms of the British Empire’s relations with the Arab peoples.

The borders of the Middle East were in the process of being redrawn, and the gentlemen at the Foreign and Colonial Office in London were determined that this process should not rebound to the Empire’s disadvantage.

There can be little doubt that the military authorities would very much have liked to punish the ringleaders, but the troopers and the junior officers of the NZ Mounted Rifles and the Australian Light Horse closed ranks against all investigation.

In the end it was left to the British Commander-in-Chief, Major-General Edmund Allenby, to state the views of His Majesty’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force. Forming the ANZAC’s into a hollow square he unleashed a tongue-lashing the like of which no British or Empire troops had heard for many, many years:

"I was proud of you as brave soldiers but now I am ashamed of you as cold-blooded murderers."

This outburst aroused such mutinous resentment among the New Zealand and Australian troops that Allenby was soon forced to retract his words.

It was a necessary concession because with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the US President, Woodrow Wilson’s, promise of "self-determination" for the world’s subject peoples, the British soon had their hands full keeping the Arab population of the region from breaking out into full scale rebellion. In this task the brutal reputation of the Australian and New Zealand troopers rode before them, striking fear into the hearts of the Arab population wherever they appeared.

　
BUT THE JEWISH SETTLERS of Rishon LeZion had no reason to fear the ANZAC’s. On the contrary they warmed to their example. It is easy to imagine the scene as the NZ Mounted Rifle Brigade saddled up and rode away south: the thoughtful expressions on the faces of the young Jewish settlers as the long column of horsemen passed through their little town.

"God-speed to your little country at the end of the world!", they cried, "and thank you for teaching us about the rules of war!"

"Oh yes," a veteran trooper shouted back, grinning at the young men over his shoulder, "and what might they be?"

"Get the other fellow before he gets you, and always look after your mates."

The trooper’s wry laughter was quickly lost in the swirling clouds of dust kicked up by the column’s multitude of hooves.

　
CHRIS TROTTER
Sunday, 11 January 2009.