Jacob Israël de Haan was a Dutch lawyer, journalist and poet. A queer man, de Haan published one of the first Dutch novels depicting a homosexual relationship between two men. After becoming interested in Zionism and Jewish nationalism, de Haan emigrated to Palestine in 1918. Not long after he arrived, he disavowed Zionism due to his sympathy with Arabs and his dismay at the conditions the Zionists were creating.
>“Two thousand years of exile and unhappiness have taught them [the Zionists] nothing. Instead of making an attempt to understand the innermost causes of our unhappiness they now try to circumvent it, as it were, by building a “national home” on foundations provided by Western power politics: and in the process of building a national home, they are committing the crime of depriving another people of its home.” — Jacob Israel de Haan, in conversation with Mohammed Asad, 1924
De Haan increasingly grew religious, joined the Haredi community of Jerusalem and became their legal representation. As the main representative of the anti-zionist Haredi Jews, he met regularly with Arab leaders and took an important role in the local and regional opposition to Zionism.
After multiple threats to his life, on June 30, 1924, he was assassinated by Avraham Tehomi of the Haganah, a Zionist militia that would later become the IDF. He was assassinated the morning he was supposed to leave for London to argue for anti-Zionism. This was the first Zionist political assassination in Mandate Palestine.
>“I have done what the Haganah decided had to be done. And nothing was done without the order of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (the second president of Israel 1952-1963)... I have no regrets because he (de Haan) wanted to destroy our whole idea of Zionism.” —Avraham Tehomi, the confessed assassin
Despite his homosexuality, he is honored today by Neturei Karta as hero and a martyr.
Sources:
Bush, Lawrence. "June 30: Jacob Israel de Haan” Jewish Currents Magazine, 2014
https://jewishcurrents.org/june-30-jacob-israel-de-haan
Drishya. "The Queer Dissident Zionism Could Not Contain: Jacob Israël de Haan" The Polis Project. April 2026. https://thepolisproject.com/read/jacob-israel-de-haan-queer-anti-zionist/
Giebelas, Ludy. “Jacob Israel de Haan in Mandate Palestine: Was the Victim of the First Zionist Political Assassination a ‘Jewish Lawrence of Arabia’?” Jewish Historical Studies, vol. 46, 2014, pp. 107–29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43855720
Witt, Nathan. “Jacob Israel de Haan: A Queer and Lapsed Zionist in Mandate Palestine. Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 87, Autumn 2021. Institute for Palestine Studies. https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1651902
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> On his final day at the company, a Microsoft worker in Italy has sent out an email to thousands of colleagues informing them of how the corporation operates as the technological backbone of the Gaza holocaust perpetrated by so-called ‘Israel’.
> The hero, known to the Canary as ‘Nour’, said:
> > After nearly two years as a Critical Environment Technician at a Microsoft Italy data center, I choose to resign. This is because, right now, Microsoft is massively expanding its European data centers (aka mass surveillance centers) to use Palestine as a laboratory for its experimental digital weaponry. For the past 994 days, Microsoft has powered the genocide of our people in Palestine, and the company’s European data centers are fundamental to how Microsoft abets crimes against humanity.