Jacob de Haan was assassinated for combining outsider status with treasonable political actions.

Evidence

In retrospect it seems that De Haan was killed because of the convergence of his peripheral status and his allegedly treasonable actions. In that it was perpetrated by the upper echelon of the proto-state, we now know that De Haan was perceived to be much more than an oddity or an irritant to the Zionists. His supposed homosexuality, his apparent closeness to Arabs, and his public identification with the Haredim deprived him of respectability, which meant that the Zionists would not offend any constituency of grave concern to them. 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, 464

Categorization

• XREF: The proto-state eliminating a deviant insider via assassination evokes the pattern of sacrificial/scapegoat politics in ritual murder contexts—links to the ‘On Sacrifice’ article’s examination of who gets killed to stabilize a social order.
• DEEPTHINKING: The convergence of ‘peripheral status’ plus ‘treasonable actions’ as a killing trigger, where the assassin’s concern is not the victim’s guilt but which constituency would be offended by letting him live, is a genuinely dense political logic worth sitting with.