Jacob Israël de Haan

Jacob Israël de Haan (31 December 1881 – 30 June 1924) was a Dutch Jewish literary writer, lawyer and journalist who immigrated to Palestine in 1919, and was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1924 by the Zionist paramilitary organization Haganah for his anti-Zionist political activities.

Assassination
As part of his anti-Zionist activity, De Haan was just about to leave for London when he was assassinated in Jerusalem by the Haganah on the early morning of 30 June 1924. As he exited the synagogue at the Shaare Zedek Hospital on Jaffa Road, Haganah member Avraham Tehomi, who was dressed in white, approached him and asked him for the time, then shot him three times and ran away from the scene. De Haan died minutes later.

At first, the Palestinian Jewish society, the Yishuv, readily accepted the theory that the assassination had to be blamed on Arabs, and didn’t doubt the Zionist leadership’s assurances that it had played no part in it. With time doubts started rising, until finally, in 1952, Yosef Hecht, the first commander of the main Jewish pre-state self-defense organization, the Haganah, told the official Haganah historian in a testimony what had actually occurred. Hecht, in order to stop De Haan’s activity in London, discussed the issue with Zechariah Urieli, the Haganah commander in Jerusalem, and the resulting decision was to assassinate him. Two Haganah members, Avraham Tehomi and Avraham Krichevsky, were selected for the task. Hecht only informed the Yishuv’s civilian leadership after the assassination, by contacting Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, a senior member of the National Council. Hecht stated that “he did not regret it and would do it again.” Previously to the facts being published, journalist Liel Leibovitz wrote that, while the identity of exactly who ordered the assassination was unknown, “there’s little doubt that many in the senior Zionist leadership in Jerusalem knew about the proposal to kill de Haan—and that none objected.”

The 1985 publication of De Haan: The first political assassination in Palestine, by Shlomo Nakdimon and Shaul Mayzlish, revived wider interest in his assassination.

Nakdimon and Mayzlish were able to trace Tehomi, then a businessman living in Hong Kong. Tehomi was interviewed for Israeli TV by Nakdimon and stated that Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who later became the second President of Israel (1952-1963), must have ordered the assassination: “I have done what the Haganah decided had to be done. And nothing was done without the order of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. I have no regrets because he (De Haan) wanted to destroy our whole idea of Zionism.” Tehomi denied allegations that De Haan’s assassination was related to his homosexuality: “I neither heard nor knew about this”, adding “why is it someone’s business what he does at his home?”