Yael Kahn is the daughter of Jewish parents who had escaped from Germany before the war, married in the UK, and then settled in the Middle East. She grew up in a home culture and schooling which kept her completely ignorant of the Nakba, and even though the family lived in the south of Israel just a few miles from Ghazzah, she didn’t hear about Palestinians, and wasn’t even taught about Zionism.
As she grew up in a small community, she began to sense the racist structure of her society, where she was treated with respect as a German Jew, while a neighbour who was an actual Auschwitz survivor was isolated and othered. She began to realise that culturally a whole generation was brought up with this supremacist attitude, and to her, it partly explains how genocidal the entire country has become.
Just before the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, she came across a Jewish Israeli Socialist group called Matzpen, and began to learn about the horrors of the Nakba, which informed the anti-Zionism which has become a major part of her life.
After the occupation of Lebanon in 1982, she was part of a group that discovered mass graves and evidence of torture at Israeli prisons, but despite best efforts she experienced media disinterest or complicit silence over Israel’s crimes, which we recognise only too well today.
Around the time of the First Intifada in 1987, Yael was regularly visiting refugee camps in Gaza, helping with aid and donations, holding weekly protests in Tel Aviv, and organising a pressure group which successfully liberated Palestinian women political prisoners held in prisons without trial under ‘administrative detention’.
Yael came to the UK in 1988 after Israel defeated the Intifada, and continued her anti-Zionist campaigning. Her last visit to Israel was in 2003 to say goodbye to her dying father. The secret service tried to arrest her as she left, but lawyers intervened and she returned to the UK knowing she would never return to Israel while it remained an apartheid Zionist society. She had one more chance to visit friends in Gaza when the wall at the Rafah crossing was torn down in 2008, but she also had a foreboding of what was to come. After Israel attacked Gaza at the end of that year, she saw UK politicians supporting it fully (David Milliband and Gordon Brown), as they do now.
When Israel unleashed its vengeance on the people of Palestine after the October 7 attack, Yael sensed it would become the genocide she always thought was possible, and that’s when she started using the term ‘Nazi Israel’ on her various home-made banners, leading to several arrests.
At Highbury this week, dozens of supporters turned up as she spoke outside the Magistrate’s Court. Yael is accused of the public order offence of “causing intentional harassment, alarm or distress”, which appears to relate to a speech made at a weekly International Anti-Zionist Jewish Network protest which used to take place at Swiss Cottage, near the residence of Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotovely. That protest regularly attracted a small band of Zionist supporters, filming and listening and then reporting their ‘alarm’ or ‘distress’ to police officers in attendance.
Yael was arrested in January this year, but says she has not been told what is the exact accusation against her, but that the accuser has withdrawn their name from the case. Yael’s lawyer requested the case be dropped with ‘no case to answer’, but Deputy District Judge Jackson demanded that Yael enter a plea (Not Guilty), and she is now bailed to return for a hearing on 27th October at Highbury Magistrate’s Court.
We are pleased to have permission to publish this sensitive and powerfully illustrated interview film made by Bedbug Productions in which Yael speaks about her life as an anti-Zionist activist.
FILM CREDIT: BEDBUG PRODUCTIONS
