1918: Surafend Massacre
December 10, 2021
By AHNZ
Today in history, 10 December, 1918, the Surafend Massacre.
The New Zealand and Australian camp in Palestine was subject to ongoing thefts and raids by the adjacent sand people. One day one of the Arab thieves became too bold and killed one of our warriors in the course of stealing from him.
After military police interviews and forensic investigations turned up nothing the New Zealanders decided to take matters into their own hands. The Arab village of Surafend was set upon and burned to the ground. Women and children were permitted to flee but the men were cut down by the bayonets of some 200 of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles.
“The actions of the raiders cannot be explained away as an over-reaction by stressed combatants caught up in the heat of battle. The raid was carefully planned and ruthlessly carried out by trained soldiers who knew that the war was over, and that the prospective victims were civilians who represented little or no threat to them. In this writer’s opinion, the raiders’ purpose from the outset was to kill at least some of the men they found in the village.” – Terry Kinloch, ww100.govt.nz (2018)
The New Zealand soldiers, by now, were honed to a strong Honor Culture by this point. That means they had a strong preference for dealing with problems personally, especially when doing things ‘by the book’ was getting nowhere. It also meant that they stood by each other in solidarity so that nobody broke ranks and implicated anyone else so no disciplinary action could be taken. It was men like these who came home to the post-epidemic New Zealand to take leading roles in society and shape our 1920s.
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