De Haan’s Arab negotiations and press access sealed his death sentence.

Evidence

The situation came to a head in 1924 because De Haan had committed a number of heresies: he was conducting high-level negotiations with Arab elites whom the Zionists themselves wished to court, and he was about to engage in even more visible discussions with Emir Abdallah of Transjordan, with whom he was known to be on extremely good terms. Perhaps worst of all, he was speaking ill of the movement to the outside world in his capacity as a journalist for the Dutch and British press. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 444

Categorization

• BMF: The pattern where a peripheral figure’s intimacy with the local population and media access makes them more threatening than any central rival evokes the assassination politics in Salman Rushdie’s Shame or analogous Cold War spy novels about peripheral dissidents — though none in the exact library list; suggest adding Rushdie’s Shame to the reading list.