Israel NZ friendship forged on battlefield
The Israel New Zealand Friendship Association formed in 2017 in recognition of the need to restore the memory of the Battle of Ayun Kara and the friendship formed at that time. The group is seeking to have a memorial erected in Israel to remember the 18,000 soldiers who fought in the WW1 Palestine Campaign and to honour the 53 who died.
Guest Post: Māori and Pacifika in the Middle East during WW1
Historians consider the battle of Ayun Kara to have been the most costly engagement of the Palestine campaign for the New Zealanders. It was a battle fought at close range, with machine guns and artillery between a reinforced division of entrenched Ottoman troops who occupied the sandy dunes near the Jewish settlement of Rishon LeZion…