THE surprise with which the British forces in the plain beheld the European- style villages of the Jewish settlers is curious for intelligence reasons, but it was paralleled by another revelation. ‘The papers have been full of the wretched inhabitants of Palestine starving of hunger’, wrote Trooper Idriess in early December. ‘It is certainly not true of the people we have seen so far.’ One of the most pleasant aspects of reaching better-watered land was the profusion of fruit available. ‘Struck a fine orange orchard that the owner had left so we helped ourselves pretty well,’ noted Trooper Burchill in his diary, adding, ‘also plenty of wine’, and Private Brockie put it in context: ‘You can imagine how we eat oranges. For three weeks we had nothing but bully beef and hard biscuits, so the oranges did us a lot of good.’

Relations with the Jewish inhabitants were generally good. Colonel Olden of the 10th Australian Light Horse, from Western Australia, found himself chatting to a saucy Jewish girl from Perth, and General Chauvel stayed in a house in Richon which belonged to another Western Australian. The Arabs, however, were more suspicious. Idriess, still commenting about the misleading newspaper reports, wrote

The difficulty of making generalizations, however, is illustrated by the different experiences of Gaza and Jaffa. Both had been evacuated by order of Jamal Pasha. Gaza had been bombarded and besieged; Jaffa fell without a fight. Weeks after its capture, Gaza was still deserted; no doubt the former inhabitants had been taken far into the interior. At Jaffa not all the inhabitants seem to have been removed, and considerable numbers had returned even before the city was captured. General Chauvel's New Zealanders took the city on 16 November, and three days later he wrote to his wife that ‘all the better class of residents have been deported’, but a week later he was writing that ‘the inhabitants of Jaffa … of all shades of colour are streaming back into it from all directions in every sort of conveyance.’