Almost a million Jews were expelled from Arab lands in the 40s and 50s.  Few advocate for their repatriation or even compensation.  Those guilty of their ethnic cleansing have never been brought to justice.  This documentary reminds us of what happened and we believe their plight forms a piece of the puzzle in solving the Middle East conflict.

A former AP correspondent explains how and why reporters get Israel so wrong, and why it matters

The Israel Story

Is there anything left to say about Israel and Gaza? Newspapers this summer have been full of little else. Television viewers see heaps of rubble and plumes of smoke in their sleep. A representative article from a recent issue of The New Yorker described the summer’s events by dedicating one sentence each to the horrors in Nigeria and Ukraine, four sentences to the crazed génocidaires of ISIS, and the rest of the article—30 sentences—to Israel and Gaza.

When the hysteria abates, I believe the events in Gaza will not be remembered by the world as particularly important. People were killed, most of them Palestinians, including many unarmed innocents. I wish I could say the tragedy of their deaths, or the deaths of Israel’s soldiers, will change something, that they mark a turning point. But they don’t. This round was not the first in the Arab wars with Israel and will not be the last. The Israeli campaign was little different in its execution from any other waged by a Western army against a similar enemy in recent years, except for the more immediate nature of the threat to a country’s own population, and the greater exertions, however futile, to avoid civilian deaths.

While global mania about Israeli actions has come to be taken for granted, it is actually the result of decisions made by individual human beings in positions of responsibility—in this case, journalists and editors. The world is not responding to events in this country, but rather to the description of these events by news organizations. The key to understanding the strange nature of the response is thus to be found in the practice of journalism, and specifically in a severe malfunction that is occurring in that profession—my profession—here in Israel.

In this essay I will try to provide a few tools to make sense of the news from Israel. I acquired these tools as an insider: Between 2006 and the end of 2011 I was a reporter and editor in the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press, one of the world’s two biggest news providers. I have lived in Israel since 1995 and have been reporting on it since 1997.

This essay is not an exhaustive survey of the sins of the international media, a conservative polemic, or a defense of Israeli policies. (I am a believer in the importance of the “mainstream” media, a liberal, and a critic of many of my country’s policies.) It necessarily involves some generalizations. I will first outline the central tropes of the international media’s Israel story—a story on which there is surprisingly little variation among mainstream outlets, and one which is, as the word “story” suggests, a narrative construct that is largely fiction. I will then note the broader historical context of the way Israel has come to be discussed and explain why I believe it to be a matter of concern not only for people preoccupied with Jewish affairs. I will try to keep it brief.

How Important Is the Israel Story?

Staffing is the best measure of the importance of a story to a particular news organization. When I was a correspondent at the AP, the agency had more than 40 staffers covering Israel and the Palestinian territories. That was significantly more news staff than the AP had in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the 50 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. It was higher than the total number of news-gathering employees in all the countries where the uprisings of the “Arab Spring” eventually erupted.

To offer a sense of scale: Before the outbreak of the civil war in Syria, the permanent AP presence in that country consisted of a single regime-approved stringer. The AP’s editors believed, that is, that Syria’s importance was less than one-40th that of Israel. I don’t mean to pick on the AP—the agency is wholly average, which makes it useful as an example. The big players in the news business practice groupthink, and these staffing arrangements were reflected across the herd. Staffing levels in Israel have decreased somewhat since the Arab uprisings began, but remain high. And when Israel flares up, as it did this summer, reporters are often moved from deadlier conflicts. Israel still trumps nearly everything else.

The volume of press coverage that results, even when little is going on, gives this conflict a prominence compared to which its actual human toll is absurdly small. In all of 2013, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claimed 42 lives—that is, roughly the monthly homicide rate in the city of Chicago. Jerusalem, internationally renowned as a city of conflict, had slightly fewer violent deaths per capita last year than Portland, Ore., one of America’s safer cities. In contrast, in three years the Syrian conflict has claimed an estimated 190,000 lives, or about 70,000 more than the number of people who have ever died in the Arab-Israeli conflict since it began a century ago.

News organizations have nonetheless decided that this conflict is more important than, for example, the more than 1,600 women murdered in Pakistan last year (271 after being raped and 193 of them burned alive), the ongoing erasure of Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party, the carnage in Congo (more than 5 million dead as of 2012) or the Central African Republic, and the drug wars in Mexico (death toll between 2006 and 2012: 60,000), let alone conflicts no one has ever heard of in obscure corners of India or Thailand. They believe Israel to be the most important story on earth, or very close.

What Is Important About the Israel Story, and What Is Not

A reporter working in the international press corps here understands quickly that what is important in the Israel-Palestinian story is Israel. If you follow mainstream coverage, you will find nearly no real analysis of Palestinian society or ideologies, profiles of armed Palestinian groups, or investigation of Palestinian government. Palestinians are not taken seriously as agents of their own fate. The West has decided that Palestinians should want a state alongside Israel, so that opinion is attributed to them as fact, though anyone who has spent time with actual Palestinians understands that things are (understandably, in my opinion) more complicated. Who they are and what they want is not important: The story mandates that they exist as passive victims of the party that matters.

Corruption, for example, is a pressing concern for many Palestinians under the rule of the Palestinian Authority, but when I and another reporter once suggested an article on the subject, we were informed by the bureau chief that Palestinian corruption was “not the story.” (Israeli corruption was, and we covered it at length.)

Israeli actions are analyzed and criticized, and every flaw in Israeli society is aggressively reported. In one seven-week period, from Nov. 8 to Dec. 16, 2011, I decided to count the stories coming out of our bureau on the various moral failings of Israeli society—proposed legislation meant to suppress the media, the rising influence of Orthodox Jews, unauthorized settlement outposts, gender segregation, and so forth. I counted 27 separate articles, an average of a story every two days. In a very conservative estimate, this seven-week tally was higher than the total number of significantly critical stories about Palestinian government and society, including the totalitarian Islamists of Hamas, that our bureau had published in the preceding three years.

The Hamas charter, for example, calls not just for Israel’s destruction but for the murder of Jews and blames Jews for engineering the French and Russian revolutions and both world wars; the charter was never mentioned in print when I was at the AP, though Hamas won a Palestinian national election and had become one of the region’s most important players. To draw the link with this summer’s events: An observer might think Hamas’ decision in recent years to construct a military infrastructure beneath Gaza’s civilian infrastructure would be deemed newsworthy, if only because of what it meant about the way the next conflict would be fought and the cost to innocent people. But that is not the case. The Hamas emplacements were not important in themselves, and were therefore ignored. What was important was the Israeli decision to attack them.

There has been much discussion recently of Hamas attempts to intimidate reporters. Any veteran of the press corps here knows the intimidation is real, and I saw it in action myself as an editor on the AP news desk. During the 2008-2009 Gaza fighting I personally erased a key detail—that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and being counted as civilians in the death toll—because of a threat to our reporter in Gaza. (The policy was then, and remains, not to inform readers that the story is censored unless the censorship is Israeli. Earlier this month, the AP’s Jerusalem news editor reported and submitted a story on Hamas intimidation; the story was shunted into deep freeze by his superiors and has not been published.)

But if critics imagine that journalists are clamoring to cover Hamas and are stymied by thugs and threats, it is generally not so. There are many low-risk ways to report Hamas actions, if the will is there: under bylines from Israel, under no byline, by citing Israeli sources. Reporters are resourceful when they want to be.

The fact is that Hamas intimidation is largely beside the point because the actions of Palestinians are beside the point: Most reporters in Gaza believe their job is to document violence directed by Israel at Palestinian civilians. That is the essence of the Israel story. In addition, reporters are under deadline and often at risk, and many don’t speak the language and have only the most tenuous grip on what is going on. They are dependent on Palestinian colleagues and fixers who either fear Hamas, support Hamas, or both. Reporters don’t need Hamas enforcers to shoo them away from facts that muddy the simple story they have been sent to tell.

It is not coincidence that the few journalists who have documented Hamas fighters and rocket launches in civilian areas this summer were generally not, as you might expect, from the large news organizations with big and permanent Gaza operations. They were mostly scrappy, peripheral, and newly arrived players—a Finn, an Indian crew, a few others. These poor souls didn’t get the memo.

What Else Isn’t Important?

The fact that Israelis quite recently elected moderate governments that sought reconciliation with the Palestinians, and which were undermined by the Palestinians, is considered unimportant and rarely mentioned. These lacunae are often not oversights but a matter of policy. In early 2009, for example, two colleagues of mine obtained information that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had made a significant peace offer to the Palestinian Authority several months earlier, and that the Palestinians had deemed it insufficient. This had not been reported yet and it was—or should have been—one of the biggest stories of the year. The reporters obtained confirmation from both sides and one even saw a map, but the top editors at the bureau decided that they would not publish the story.

Some staffers were furious, but it didn’t help. Our narrative was that the Palestinians were moderate and the Israelis recalcitrant and increasingly extreme. Reporting the Olmert offer—like delving too deeply into the subject of Hamas—would make that narrative look like nonsense. And so we were instructed to ignore it, and did, for more than a year and a half.

This decision taught me a lesson that should be clear to consumers of the Israel story: Many of the people deciding what you will read and see from here view their role not as explanatory but as political. Coverage is a weapon to be placed at the disposal of the side they like.

How Is the Israel Story Framed?

The Israel story is framed in the same terms that have been in use since the early 1990s—the quest for a “two-state solution.” It is accepted that the conflict is “Israeli-Palestinian,” meaning that it is a conflict taking place on land that Israel controls—0.2 percent of the Arab world—in which Jews are a majority and Arabs a minority. The conflict is more accurately described as “Israel-Arab,” or “Jewish-Arab”—that is, a conflict between the 6 million Jews of Israel and 300 million Arabs in surrounding countries. (Perhaps “Israel-Muslim” would be more accurate, to take into account the enmity of non-Arab states like Iran and Turkey, and, more broadly, 1 billion Muslims worldwide.) This is the conflict that has been playing out in different forms for a century, before Israel existed, before Israel captured the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, and before the term “Palestinian” was in use.

The “Israeli-Palestinian” framing allows the Jews, a tiny minority in the Middle East, to be depicted as the stronger party. It also includes the implicit assumption that if the Palestinian problem is somehow solved the conflict will be over, though no informed person today believes this to be true. This definition also allows the Israeli settlement project, which I believe is a serious moral and strategic error on Israel’s part, to be described not as what it is—one more destructive symptom of the conflict—but rather as its cause.

A knowledgeable observer of the Middle East cannot avoid the impression that the region is a volcano and that the lava is radical Islam, an ideology whose various incarnations are now shaping this part of the world. Israel is a tiny village on the slopes of the volcano. Hamas is the local representative of radical Islam and is openly dedicated to the eradication of the Jewish minority enclave in Israel, just as Hezbollah is the dominant representative of radical Islam in Lebanon, the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and so forth.

Hamas is not, as it freely admits, party to the effort to create a Palestinian state alongside Israel. It has different goals about which it is quite open and that are similar to those of the groups listed above. Since the mid 1990s, more than any other player, Hamas has destroyed the Israeli left, swayed moderate Israelis against territorial withdrawals, and buried the chances of a two-state compromise. That’s one accurate way to frame the story.

An observer might also legitimately frame the story through the lens of minorities in the Middle East, all of which are under intense pressure from Islam: When minorities are helpless, their fate is that of the Yazidis or Christians of northern Iraq, as we have just seen, and when they are armed and organized they can fight back and survive, as in the case of the Jews and (we must hope) the Kurds.

There are, in other words, many different ways to see what is happening here. Jerusalem is less than a day’s drive from Aleppo or Baghdad, and it should be clear to everyone that peace is pretty elusive in the Middle East even in places where Jews are absent. But reporters generally cannot see the Israel story in relation to anything else. Instead of describing Israel as one of the villages abutting the volcano, they describe Israel as the volcano.

The Israel story is framed to seem as if it has nothing to do with events nearby because the “Israel” of international journalism does not exist in the same geo-political universe as Iraq, Syria, or Egypt. The Israel story is not a story about current events. It is about something else.

The Old Blank Screen

For centuries, stateless Jews played the role of a lightning rod for ill will among the majority population. They were a symbol of things that were wrong. Did you want to make the point that greed was bad? Jews were greedy. Cowardice? Jews were cowardly. Were you a Communist? Jews were capitalists. Were you a capitalist? In that case, Jews were Communists. Moral failure was the essential trait of the Jew. It was their role in Christian tradition—the only reason European society knew or cared about them in the first place.

Like many Jews who grew up late in the 20th century in friendly Western cities, I dismissed such ideas as the feverish memories of my grandparents. One thing I have learned—and I’m not alone this summer—is that I was foolish to have done so. Today, people in the West tend to believe the ills of the age are racism, colonialism, and militarism. The world’s only Jewish country has done less harm than most countries on earth, and more good—and yet when people went looking for a country that would symbolize the sins of our new post-colonial, post-militaristic, post-ethnic dream-world, the country they chose was this one.

When the people responsible for explaining the world to the world, journalists, cover the Jews’ war as more worthy of attention than any other, when they portray the Jews of Israel as the party obviously in the wrong, when they omit all possible justifications for the Jews’ actions and obscure the true face of their enemies, what they are saying to their readers—whether they intend to or not—is that Jews are the worst people on earth. The Jews are a symbol of the evils that civilized people are taught from an early age to abhor. International press coverage has become a morality play starring a familiar villain.

Some readers might remember that Britain participated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the fallout from which has now killed more than three times the number of people ever killed in the Israel-Arab conflict; yet in Britain, protesters furiously condemn Jewish militarism. White people in London and Paris whose parents not long ago had themselves fanned by dark people in the sitting rooms of Rangoon or Algiers condemn Jewish “colonialism.” Americans who live in places called “Manhattan” or “Seattle” condemn Jews for displacing the native people of Palestine. Russian reporters condemn Israel’s brutal military tactics. Belgian reporters condemn Israel’s treatment of Africans. When Israel opened a transportation service for Palestinian workers in the occupied West Bank a few years ago, American news consumers could read about Israel “segregating buses.” And there are a lot of people in Europe, and not just in Germany, who enjoy hearing the Jews accused of genocide.

You don’t need to be a history professor, or a psychiatrist, to understand what’s going on. Having rehabilitated themselves against considerable odds in a minute corner of the earth, the descendants of powerless people who were pushed out of Europe and the Islamic Middle East have become what their grandparents were—the pool into which the world spits. The Jews of Israel are the screen onto which it has become socially acceptable to project the things you hate about yourself and your own country. The tool through which this psychological projection is executed is the international press.

Who Cares If the World Gets the Israel Story Wrong?

Because a gap has opened here between the way things are and the way they are described, opinions are wrong and policies are wrong, and observers are regularly blindsided by events. Such things have happened before. In the years leading to the breakdown of Soviet Communism in 1991, as the Russia expert Leon Aron wrote in a 2011 essay for Foreign Policy, “virtually no Western expert, scholar, official, or politician foresaw the impending collapse of the Soviet Union.” The empire had been rotting for years and the signs were there, but the people who were supposed to be seeing and reporting them failed and when the superpower imploded everyone was surprised.

And there was the Spanish civil war: “Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which do not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. … I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what had happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines.’ ” That was George Orwell, writing in 1942.

Orwell did not step off an airplane in Catalonia, stand next to a Republican cannon, and have himself filmed while confidently repeating what everyone else was saying or describing what any fool could see: weaponry, rubble, bodies. He looked beyond the ideological fantasies of his peers and knew that what was important was not necessarily visible. Spain, he understood, was not really about Spain at all—it was about a clash of totalitarian systems, German and Russian. He knew he was witnessing a threat to European civilization, and he wrote that, and he was right.

Understanding what happened in Gaza this summer means understanding Hezbollah in Lebanon, the rise of the Sunni jihadis in Syria and Iraq, and the long tentacles of Iran. It requires figuring out why countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia now see themselves as closer to Israel than to Hamas. Above all, it requires us to understand what is clear to nearly everyone in the Middle East: The ascendant force in our part of the world is not democracy or modernity. It is rather an empowered strain of Islam that assumes different and sometimes conflicting forms, and that is willing to employ extreme violence in a quest to unite the region under its control and confront the West. Those who grasp this fact will be able to look around and connect the dots.

Israel is not an idea, a symbol of good or evil, or a litmus test for liberal opinion at dinner parties. It is a small country in a scary part of the world that is getting scarier. It should be reported as critically as any other place, and understood in context and in proportion. Israel is not one of the most important stories in the world, or even in the Middle East; whatever the outcome in this region in the next decade, it will have as much to do with Israel as World War II had to do with Spain. Israel is a speck on the map—a sideshow that happens to carry an unusual emotional charge.

Many in the West clearly prefer the old comfort of parsing the moral failings of Jews, and the familiar feeling of superiority this brings them, to confronting an unhappy and confusing reality. They may convince themselves that all of this is the Jews’ problem, and indeed the Jews’ fault. But journalists engage in these fantasies at the cost of their credibility and that of their profession. And, as Orwell would tell us, the world entertains fantasies at its peril.

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We continue our series of articles as we mark the centenary of the ANZAC Palestine campaign in 1917:  This month, in the second of our series,  we give you a taste of what food was like on the NZ campaign.

The NZ Army Museum in Waiouru is currently hosting an exhibition called “Food, Glorious Food: An Army Marches on its Stomach” to enlighten Kiwis on the horrors of army food rations in the First World War. Sadly the Sinai Palestine campaign was no gourmet exception, rather it was quite the reverse. Our soldiers suffered disproportionately because of their isolation and location and the fact that they could not recuperate on normal rations during their leave periods.

Certainly, the Middle East campaign disrupted food supplies for locals and others and given the huge numbers of extra personnel involved. Even a limited variety of fresh fruit and vegetables were not readily available. Service personnel relied on their governments to send basic food supplies which were also supplemented by parcels from home. So despite having knowledge of prevention of diseases like scurvy, the NZ soldier’s condition was only going to deteriorate in the campaign from lack of calories, vitamins and minerals. This was all too real after the Jordan Valley phase in 1918 when the men lost fighting condition. Dietary restrictions and harsh conditions must have impacted on their long term health as well.

The basic diet comprised a small daily water bottle of fresh water, sometimes barely potable and a ration of porridge or rice, tinned greasy corned beef, a biscuit that resembles a large modern dog biscuit, a can of questionable condensed milk, marmalade, some tea and sugar and very little else. Camp rations weren’t much better. The biscuit was so hard many soldiers cracked or lost teeth trying to eat it. Rations were barely enough to cover the calorific requirements of active service. The monotony of the diet must have been demoralizing, but hunger would have driven them to eat almost anything. Additional army supplies included seasonal jams seasonal. A cherished fruitcake or gingernuts made with love would have provided welcome relief and an opportunity to share with your mates. Sometimes supplies were left in the sun and became too hot to handle or went off adding to the misery. The volume of flies drawn by the smell of food made eating a quick and stressful affair.

So you can imagine the joy our soldiers must have felt to arrive in Rishon Le Zion and see the orchards. The day after the battle the soldiers were given a famous Jaffa orange each. It must have been like heaven! Then in the next days they were able to sample the delicacies of the local wines both in Rishon and in Jaffa, all for medicinal purposes! Later on in the campaign they could purchase food like tomatoes and cucumbers from Jordan Valley locals to supplement army supplies.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Joanna Moss is a Wellington-based researcher and writer.  See the food exhibition at National Army Museum Waiouru until Nov 1917 & at Hamilton’s Waikato Museum “Sand in the Apricot Jam” 4 March -11 June.

ANZACs in the Desert

We continue our series of articles as we mark the centenary of the ANZAC Palestine campaign in 1917:  In the first two parts of this series we explained how ANZAC troops came to be deployed to fight the Turks in the Sinai Palestine area.  In the third part, we gave you a taste of what food was like on the NZ campaign.

Following the Turk’s unsuccessful charge on the Suez in 1916, the Allied forces began their defence of the Suez Canal and the clearance of the Sinai Peninsula. This was to take them the rest of 1916 and into 1917 yet the distance covered was less than 200km.

It’s 180km from Port Said to Rafah, the border town between Sinai and Israel today. This distance is equivalent to driving from Auckland to the outskirts of Tauranga or from Christchurch to just south of Timaru.

In effect there were three enemies, the Turks supported by superior German aircraft, the 35,000 Bedouins who resided in Sinai and the desert conditions, the latter described by the men as the Chief Enemy.

Any one of them was capable of destroying life in a short span of time. Once the Suez Canal was behind them our troops encountered a horizon dominated by sand, sand and more sand. The conditions were vastly different to Gallipoli or anything else they had seen in their lives beforehand.

Coupled with limited appreciation of how long they would spend in the desert, it must have been a dismal sight. For the horses, it would be a baptism of sand and extreme hardship.

British Lieutenant General Sir Archibald Murray chose the trans Sinai route known as the King’s Highway (Dar El Sultani) a track not far in from the Mediterranean Sea identified by a telegraph cable, the only real marker.

Its coastal proximity meant soft sand that precluded conventional shipping of supplies requiring reliance on camels with lesser carrying capacity. It was slow going for the troops trudging through the soft sand.

However, the real reason for the slow progress was the building and defence of a train track and a water pipeline – the necessities of life.

The enemy knew they could defeat the Allies simply by denying them water and blowing up the wells. In order to survive some troops had to be based at camps near water as a protective measure, so their first destination was the Katia oasis 40 km east of the Canal and later the Romani and Etmaler wells. These desert oases comprised small patches of date palms and shrubs.

However, being near to the coast, the water was often salty and bitter, so not very potable. The engineers offered a vital service in verifying tracked down water sources, repairing wells, testing and designating water quality. Water brought in from outside was often treated Canal water.

Meanwhile the troops had to remain invisible from the air and hidden from Turkish scouts or Bedouin, who could give them away. They would divide up to be better concealed, but had to always remain within signal range for safety sake.

Consequently, much driving progress was made at night. As the horses were their only means of transport, they remained top priority and required many hours of daily care (feeding, watering and grooming) to maintain battle-ready condition. Digging trenches and patrolling were the top two occupations.

The ANZACs were met with a grim reality when they discovered the toll the Easter Katia Turkish raid had taken on their Yeomanry British counterparts. As the summer wore on the conditions in the daytime became unbearable and some of the men suffered from sunstroke and were hospitalised.

Getting them out of the desert would not have been easy. Survival hinged on managing the desert conditions both to live and to fight. At times, this included fogs, mirages, freezing conditions, of course the proverbial sandstorms and the famous Kamsin winds that dried everything.

Sometimes the water would arrive in drums too hot to drink, adding to the misery. As time went on the troops became very familiar with the desert and were able to navigate at night using only a compass.

Moonlight provided some terrain guidance, but could also work to their enemy’s advantage. The Turks were pushed back and Sinai was finally conquered in early January as the troops moved on into Gaza.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Joanna Moss is a Wellington-based researcher and writer. See the food exhibition at National Army Museum Waiouru until Nov 1917 & at Hamilton’s Waikato Museum “Sand in the Apricot Jam” 4 March -11 June.

Prisoners of War captured by the Turks after the First Battle of Gaza.

We continue our series of articles as we mark the centenary of the ANZAC Palestine campaign in 1917:  In the first three parts of this series we explained how ANZAC troops came to be deployed to fight the Turks in the Sinai Palestine area; we gave you a taste of what food was like on the NZ campaign and we discussed the climate and conditions met by the ANZACs.

By January 1917, Rafah had been captured and the Sinai was in British hands. It was time to press on northward towards Gaza.

The coastal railroad continued to supply troops with provisions and much needed water indicating a coastal campaign was preferable. The Anzac troops took the opportunity to get some rest before beginning the next phase in late February.

Khan Yunis was occupied by the ANZACs on 28th with very little resistance. The British command expected the Turks to retreat northward. Lloyd George was now PM and he wanted victory quickly to counter the stalemate on the Western Front.

Murray ordered the first Gazan offensive in late March taking the Turks by surprise. It was the best use of the mounted division and conducted under extreme cold and fog that camouflaged their position.

Once the Germans got wind of the attack they called for reinforcements. Time was of the essence. The ANZACs had to penetrate the fields to the north ringed by cacti hedges (3m high and 5m wide) with their bayonets and get the wells.

The Wellingtons made it into Gaza capturing the outer streets as did the Australians. Sadly Chetwode and Dobell were concerned about water and reinforcements and so ordered the troops to withdraw. It was to be a costly blunder.

The ANZAC leaders stood their ground waiting for confirmation in disbelief. It was a bitter blow to the troops and to their confidence in British leadership. When the error was discovered some troops were sent back only to be repelled. It was too late.

The second battle began on the 17th March, but by this time the Turks had reinforced in numbers and dug in expecting a major offensive on Gaza and the Gaza-Beersheva road. The EEF were no match for them. This time the campaign had to be largely infantry driven (British) with the mounteds playing a supporting role.

Overhead the German Taubs monitored enemy positions. The infantry losses were considerable and with little chance for advancement, a retreat was ordered. By the end the NZMR had four nights without sleep and suffered heavy losses of horses; who were attacked from the air. NZ casualties were 88.  The troops became more despondent. The potential for a Western Front type stalemate loomed.

Lieut Gen Murray; who had been based in Egypt, had declared a victory in the first battle to the Home Office with British media suggesting huge numbers of Turks defeated and little resistance.

It was far from the truth. Murray had failed again in the second battle. He was ordered back to England in June and subsequent promotions meant that Edward Chaytor, a New Zealander, would now command the ANZAC Mounted Division and William Meldrum the NZMR.

Things would be relatively quiet for six months until a workable plan could be hatched by the incoming General Allenby.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Joanna Moss is a Wellington-based researcher and writer.  See the food exhibition at National Army Museum Waiouru until Nov 2017 & at Hamilton’s Waikato Museum “Sand in the Apricot Jam” 4 March -11 June.