Sunday DRIVE

Ninety-two-year-old Mohamed Diab came shuffling down an Israeli street with an unpleasant message for New Zealand.

Plainly, neither the arthritic pain of stiff legs nor the blinding heat of a Middle Eastern sun, would stop this very determined elderly man from having his say. We sat down in the cool of a whitewashed Palestinian home. The sweet fragrance of a Turkish water pipe hung in the air.

Diab revealed he was probably the last survivor of an atrocity carried out by Kiwi soldiers on his village just after the end of World War I. Arabs remember it as the mas-sacre of Surafend.

Diab showed us his ID card, with his birthdate of 1917, proving he was just a baby when the New Zealanders invaded his village. The murder of Kiwi trooper Leslie Lowry by an intruder triggered an orgy of revenge. Nearby Sarafand al-Amar (Surafend) became the victim.

The Kiwis were not convinced by the pleas of village leaders that they had no idea who was responsible. Time, they decided, to teach the Arabs a lesson. British and

Australian troops were enlisted to prevent anyone fromescaping. Asthekillingbegan, Diab’s elder