One Who Got Away From Most History Books: An Assassinated Aussie-born Friend To The Yishuv

See my note in parantheses below for relevance

Hat tip to reader Ian for alerting me to a most absorbing article by Nadav Shragai concerning Sydney-born Lewis Yelland Andrews (1896-1937), a British official in Mandate Palestine targeted for death by the Mufti of Jerusalem and murdered in 1937:

 'Lewis Yelland Andrews, the British district commissioner for the Galilee, was assassinated on his way to prayer services at the Anglican Christ Church in Nazareth on Sunday evening, Sept. 26, 1937. Four small handguns were fired at him simultaneously, killing him instantly. He was clearly a friend of the Jews, and after his death they eulogized him as though he had been one of them. The Arabs, on the other hand, had a hard time mourning for him. Although the Arab Higher Committee published an official mourning notice, residents of Acre danced on the rooftops, and Judge Anwar Nusseibeh felt that Andrews had been an Arab-hater. He remarked sarcastically that "Andrews found his God when he had gone looking for him." 

Andrews' assassins were several students of Sheikh Izzedine al-Qassam, the national hero of the Palestinians, who to this day provides inspiration to Hamas murder cells. From their perspective, the assassination of Andrews was no accident. Andrews was a high-quality target, and his murder was a kind of targeted killing directed against a man who had given actual assistance to the state in the making, "a fitting end" to a man who had become a friend to the Jews, many years before the better-known friend from that same period, Charles Orde Wingate, known to the Jewish men he commanded as "Hayadid" (the friend), was given the title.....

 In their memoirs, the heads of the Yishuv describe the day of Andrews' assassination as a dark day for them. Some admit that they wept. They did not hold back in describing Andrews' contribution to the Zionist idea, but 76 years after his murder, Andrews and his work on behalf of the Yishuv were forgotten.

Unlike Wingate, his more famous and charismatic countryman, who helped the Yishuv establish its military force and founded the well-known Special Night Squads, Andrews became nothing more than a line in the history books, and then hardly even that.

The man who offered simple yet vital assistance to the Yishuv is no longer remembered or commemorated. Andrews helped establish dozens of communities, including tower and stockade settlements. He transferred tens of thousands of dunams of land to Jewish ownership, and dozens of communities that were established in the Hula Valley region, the Beit She'an Valley and the Hefer Valley owe him their very existence.

Andrews also provided a vital umbrella of protection to the Yishuv during the Peel Commission hearings and was largely responsible for the commission's decision in 1937 to partition the western portion of the Land of Israel into a Jewish state and an Arab state — a decision that displeased the Arabs a great deal.

The Arabs made two attempts on his life: one in Acre in 1922, and another in Jerusalem during the 1930s. Both attempts failed....'

Read the fascinating story of Lewis Yelland Andrews here

(The agricultural settlement outside Melbourne referred to in the article is evidently the one established at Shepparton in the early 20th century:
'Believing that he must communicate with the Yishuv's leaders in their own language, Andrews learned both Hebrew and Arabic. He also took the Balfour Declaration, which supported "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," seriously. Once, he told agronomist Akiva Ettinger that unlike several of his colleagues, who doubted that city-bred Jews would be able to work their land and guard it, his experience in Australia — where merchants and clerks living near Melbourne had transformed into farmers — had taught him that it was entirely possible.')