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.')

Murder, Mayhem, and a Strange Case of Mandate Inertia

On the afternoon of 11 July 1938 Lily Tobias (née Shepherd, 1887-1984), from a Yiddish-speaking immigrant family in the Swansea valley, was at home in Mount Carmel putting the final touches to her novel The Samaritans. An aunt of the future famous Welsh-Jewish poet Dannie Abse and his flamboyant politician brother Leo, she was already a published writer. Her The Nationalists, and other Goluth Studies, a book of short stories, had appeared in 1921; her novel In My Mother’s House, which tells of a Welsh-born Jew who rejects, and then reclaims, his heritage, in 1931; her anti-war novel Eunice Fleet, about a conscientious objector, in 1933; and The Tube in 1935.

Lily had made aliyah in 1935, the year before the eruption of Arab disturbances in Palestine, with her husband Philip Vallentine Tobias, who was originally from South Africa, and her widowed father, a retired furniture dealer from Poland. Philip Tobias, who had been active in the Cardiff Jewish community before moving with Lily to London, where he was a founder and leading member of the Finchley Hebrew Congregation, ran a glass company in Palestine. And on that afternoon, as Lily was at work on her latest novel’s closing chapter, he was alone in his car en route to Haifa.

Philip knew that Palestine was in the grip of what an official report covering 1937 termed "a campaign of murder, intimidation, and sabotage conducted by Arab law breakers", a "terrorist campaign" which entailed "isolated murder and attempted murder; of sporadic cases of armed attacks on military, police and civilian road transport; on Jewish settlements and on both Arab and Jewish private property". He knew of such violent incidents as an assassination attempt on the Mayor of Haifa and another in Jerusalem on the Inspector-General of Police; of the brutal murders near and in Beisan of a young Jewish agriculturalist and a Jewish doctor; of the slaughter by marauding livestock-stealers of five Jewish shepherds in hill country to the south of Lake Tiberias, and of two others near Nazareth; of an unsuccessful attack on a crowded passanger train on the Lydda-Haifa line; of a series of attacks on Jews’ vehicles on the Jerusalem-Jaffa road in which one Jewish passenger lost his life. And so forth.

Nevertheless, alone on that drive, Philip Tobias had no firearm or other weapon. He seems to have been confident that, going about his lawful business in British-administered Palestine in broad daylight, he would personally encounter no danger. The assumption proved deadly. For, all of a sudden, in Haifa, his car was surrounded by a 30-strong mob of young Arab men in their teens and early twenties. They dragged Tobias from his car and stoned and stabbed him to death. According to a pressman, who accordingly described “the circumstances” of the murder as “intolerable”, the killing of Philip Tobias “it is reliably reported”, took place in plain view of “a police patrol led by an officer who witnessed the whole outrage but did not go to the rescue”.

By an eery coincidence, the book on which Lily was working when her husband met his end in cold blood was on a similar theme. Published the following year, The Samaritans proved to be her final book, although she continued to write articles for Jewish papers and to lecture on Israel and literary matters.

Tobias was the second British civilian killed in Palestine that year (the first was J. L. Starkey, director of the Marston-Wellcome Archæological Expedition to the Near East, murdered by Arabs on the evening of 10 January, when he was on his way from his camp at Tell Duweir to Jerusalem) and the first British Jew slain during Arab disturbances in Palestine since the murder of Levi Billig in 1936. Billig, born in London’s Whitechapel in 1897 to a cigar/cigarette maker and his wife, both from Russia, was a Cambridge graduate who in 1926 had been appointed Lecturer in Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was at home at his desk working on a book based on his recent research, in Persia, into early Sh’ite texts, when an Arab gunman opened fire through the window and killed him. Ironically, Billig was an advocate of Jewish-Arab reconciliation. His An Arabic Reader (1931, reprinted 1963) remains a highly regarded introductory text. (Coincidentally, his co-compiler of that work, Avinoam Yellin MBE, of the Palestine Ministry of Education, was also a victim of Arab violence; shot near his Jerusalem office on 21 October 1937, he succumbed to his wounds two days later.)

The murder of Philip Tobias was symptomatic of a crisis that had gripped Haifa since the opening days of the month; in a report filed 15 July the Jewish Chronicle’s stringer wrote of the eruption nine days earlier of what was “the complete usurpation of authority by unruly elements and the virtual handing over to what amounts to mob rule in the Eastern Quarter, main artery to the Hospital and industrial zones of Haifa and principal lines of communication between Emek Zebulon and Emek Jezreel”. Noting that the authorities seemed “powerless in spite of increased forces at their disposal” and that police and marines landed from HMS Repulse seemed oddly inert in the face of Arab hooliganism, he contined:

“What is most surprising about this situation is that the numerous outrages day after day happen at almost the same hour and the same places, so much so, that the Haifa correspondent of a Palestinian newspaper for some days on end ordered a taxi at the same time to go the rounds and ascertain what was happening! On one occasion he helped to take an injured Jewish passer-by to hospital, having arrived on the scene within a couple of minutes of the assault. It seems strange, to say the least, that the authorities could not have been as far-sighted and placed heavier patrols in that area to break up the mobs and hooligans. Today’s issue of Davar, the Hebrew Labour daily of Tel-Aviv, declared that the continuing lawlessness in Haifa represented a riddle. There were hundreds of troops, marines, and supernumerary constables available, yet in a busy street, within a few yards of the Central Police Station, a man was battered to death in broad daylight; shots were fired and bombs thrown at vehicles; knives were thrust into the backs of passersby; shops were looted, and houses set on fire.”

A Pen Portrait of Israel on the Eve of Statehood

As a brief respite from contemporary polemics, here's a visitor’s view of Eretz Israel in the year before the proclamation of Israeli Statehood. It's by Dr Simon Lehrman (1900-80), a Russian-born British Orthodox rabbi who made aliya to Israel in 1966. In this article, called “Some Palestine Impressions”, printed in the London Jewish Chronicle (10 October 1947), he writes evocatively and powerfully.  But since his country had responsibility for the Mandate, it's possible that his avoidance of discussing the political situation was based on that old adage "Discretion is the better part of valour".  I hope you find it interesting, or perhaps nostalgic:


‘Who can speak of holy Jerusalem, mystical Safed, ancient Tiberias, bustling Tev-Aviv, or beautiful Haifa without encroaching on the preserves of the poet and the artist? Similarly, who can describe the peaceful but laborious life in the settlements, or speak of the achievements in the Negev, without rifling exhaustively the vocabulary of praise and legend!

The foremost impression received on my recent visit is that the Yishuv has come to stay. No power on earth will be able to uproot that which has been so courageously built up with brawn and brain. Despite the many obstacles, natural and artificial, the network of the Histadrut and the Solel Boneh goes on building. The Jew has here been endowed with resilience and the inexhaustible fund of creative power now that he has struck roots once again in the land promised unto him already in the days of Abraham.

Whether you view the rising of the sun from Mount Scopus, the Har HaCarmel , the Galilean Hills, or from the shores of Lake Kinneret, waves of beauty enter your soul, and you feel linked in spirit to the Psalmist and prophet who made Hebrew speak in the accent of poetry and deep faith. When, at the close of a perfect day, the sun begins to descend, a huge ball of amber, into the blue Mediterranean or steep Jordan, you feel that you are witnessing the most beautiful sight on this earth. The world must have appeared so lovely at the flush of Creation.

Palestine’s beauty is matched by its plenty. Eretz Israel abounds in plenty. Every meal is a banquet, and every shop a fairy palace.

Perhaps the most abiding impression is that of the power and versatility of the Hebrew language. Modern times present no greater miracle than that of a language that had ceased to be a national tongue nearly two thousand years ago, that had waged a pale struggle for survival in our prayers and studies, but which has now emerged from its living tomb of centuries as one of the most virile and exuberant of vernaculars. You can find your way about the town and [word smudged; manage (?)] with Yiddish or English, but you will never get at the soul of this new type of Jew unless you speak Ivrit, and, bevakasha, in the accent Sefardit. At the international conference on Jewish education convened by the Hebrew University, the first of its kind in Jewish history, in which it was my proud privilege to participate as one of the Anglo-Jewish delegation, the only medium of expression was Hebrew. For nearly two weeks, morning and afternoon, the conference lasted, and during the whole of that time the burning and immediate problems were couched in rolling cadences and figures of speech of which even an Isaiah or an Amos would not have been ashamed.

But Hebrew at its best and purest is to be heard in the Habimah Theatre, in its large and spacious and artistic new home in the large square in Tel-Aviv. Unforgettable is the eve of Motsoe Shabbat when I sat listening to an exquisite performance of “Ahavat Zion,” the first Hebrew novel of its kind, written by Abraham Mappu [sic; i.e. Mapu], or that hot evening in Haifa when I witnessed a clever performance in Hebrew of the comedy “You Can’t Take It With You,” in the large Arman Theatre. To exchange conversation with the sabras, the most animated of souls, or to crack jokes with the Chalutzim in our holy mother tongue, were some of the most delightful moments crowded into a busy five weeks.

Without wishing to enter into any political issues, the impression I received was that Arab and Jew live peacefully side by side, throughout the length and breadth of the land. They have so much in common that their differences are a matter of compromise and adjustment. If only hydra-headed intrigue and dishonest interlopers were not allowed to interfere, all would be well. This belief received corroboration in Haifa and Safed, where Jew and Arab mingle on the friendliest of terms, and where the affairs of the urban council (Iriyah) are their joint concern.

Such questions as education, religion, politics, and tolerance of one another’s opinions in Eretz Israel are subjects too vast and important to be mentioned in a paragraph or two. There is one thought, however, with which I wish to conclude, and that is, that a new type of Jew is being evolved in Eretz Israel today, a type that, physically and characteristically, gives the lie to the conventional description of the Jew in non-Jewish circles. In Tel-Aviv and in Haifa, in Metulla and Revivim, the Jew is straight backed and beardless, muscular and tanned, tolerant in outlook and universal in demeanour. He is no longer the subject of inhibitions and the butt of the riff-raff in his ancestral land; he feels he is a citizen of the world, ready and willing to co-operate in all endeavours to make this world a safer place to live in for all mankind.

The Jew in Palestine regards himself as the representative of the Lion of Judah, who brought strength and beauty to the world by giving it a Bible and religion calculated to bring people nearer to God, and to raise earth to heaven. The Torah once came forth from Zion and the word of God from Jerusalem; the Jew is now ready to go forth from the Galut and people once again the wastes of Judea calling him home with a myriad tongues.’