Poetry served as a political mediation that cost the poet his life

Evidence

De Haan was fascinated with the Orient as the ideal ground of communion among the British, Arabs, Sephardim, and Ashkenazi Jews who were beholden to Orthodoxy. He probably is best remembered because in 1924, at the age of forty-three, he was the victim of what has been referred to as the first modern Jewish political murder. The crime was doubly notable because it was supposedly the first murder of a Jew by an arm of the Zionist movement. Although it is not typical for one to be killed because of poetry, a major motive behind the killing of De Haan was that he styled himself as the mediator par excellence between Arabs and Jews, a mediation in large part expressed through his Quatrains. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 448

Categorization

• QUESTION: Was De Haan’s killing ever definitively attributed to a specific Zionist faction? Worth verifying the claim of ‘first modern Jewish political murder.’
• CANDY: A poet was the first Jew killed by a Zionist arm, partly because his verses mediated between Arabs and Jews — a sharp, tweetable historical irony.
• XREF: connects to: A poet’s deepest pains can be radically severed from public and political experience — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 216