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“As an Israeli-born Jew, that my family survived the Holocaust, it’s an incredible pain, and very difficult for me,” proclaims Yael Korin in this video, “to keep watching Israel committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes against the Palestinian people, and now the Lebanese people.”

Yael Korin, an immunologist at the UCLA medical school, speaking here at a rally against the Second Lebanon War in Los Angeles on August 12, 2006, is introduced as a member of the far-Left Women in Black. Korin’s Los Angeles branch of the organization describes itself here as supporting “the right of Palestinian refugees to return [to Israel]”—recognized by all Israeli governments, Right and Left, as a formula for Israel’s destruction.

Korin goes on to tell the gathering: “What we need to remember is that Israel is born in a sin, 1948 the al-Naqba [“catastrophe” in Arabic] was a war of ethnic cleansing, of grabbing land by force and cleansing it from its inhabitants, the Palestinians…Israel consistently and persistently have been continuing this strategy, continuing grabbing more land, 1967 the whole historic Palestine…Israel wants land but it doesn’t want the people on the land, the Zionist ideology is calling for a state of Jewish people only….”

She goes on to explain that Israel is now applying this same “strategy” to southern Lebanon, where it wants to grab the land and the water sources, and so it has to be gotten out of southern Lebanon totally (something that, in the real world, Israel was actually all too glad to do on its own).

In the telling of this self-professed daughter of Holocaust survivors, then, Israel in 1948—at the same time it was already absorbing tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors—was already behaving monstrously, a savage juggernaut of land theft and ethnic cleansing. Indeed Korin’s Israel is in some respects worse than Nazi Germany, which, while exterminating certain populations, didn’t try to ethnically cleanse, for instance, Poland of all Poles or France of all French. But for Korin’s version of the “Zionist ideology…calling for a state of Jewish people only,” this would be too moderate.

So for Yael Korin, 1947-1948 was not the story of the UN Partition Plan (accepted by Israel, totally rejected by the Arab side) or of seven Arab armies massing to strangle Israel in its cradle, but rather of the newborn state of 600,000 Jews, fresh Holocaust memories and all, actually seeking war with the surrounding Arab world in a vicious land-grab. In 1967 there was no Nasser and no Soviet Union, in 2006 there was no Hizballah; it was all Israeli avarice and racism. A Jewish state that “consistently and persistently” behaves this way for sixty years running is not actually different from what Hitlerian doctrine would have expected of it—pure evil and a menace to other peoples; Korin’s and the Mein Kampfian views of Jewish collective goals and behavior are strikingly similar.

Yael Korin has been propagating this sort of vicious tripe during years in which there have been numerous deadly terrorist attacks on Israeli Jews by people who have the same emotions that she flaunts and incites: rage against Israel and Israelis and a yearning for the Jewish state’s destruction. Indeed, Korin’s sympathy for exterminatory passions toward Israel and Israelis could not have been more explicit than on March 27, 2004, when she spoke, having donned Arab garb for the occasion, at a rally outside the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles to protest Israel’s assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin—the Hamas leader responsible for the murders of over three hundred Israelis including many children.

Korin was there at the consulate again on October 17 that year—this time to protest “Israel’s latest assault on Gaza” amid demonstrators carrying signs saying “Stop Use of U.S.-Supplied WMDs on Civilians” and the like—again, the clear and emphatic link between supposed Israeli behavior and Nazi-style mass-murdering behavior. Korin and a fellow speaker at the rally had “returned days earlier from Palestine, where they had frequently joined Machsom Watch,” an Israeli women’s organization that harasses Israeli soldiers doing difficult and lifesaving anti-terror work at checkpoints. Korin “said she doesn’t want anyone to do to another people what was done to her parents”—again that fundamental, recurrent confusion in someone who announces herself as a Jew and dresses as an Arab, who can’t seem to process the notion of post-1945 Jews as victims and so instead turns them into Nazis.

Not surprisingly, Korin’s sympathy for Palestinian terrorism doesn’t stop with Ahmed Yassin and Hamas. Just recently she signed a petition for the release of Sami Al-Arian, the University of South Florida computer scientist convicted in 2006 of aiding Palestinian Islamic Jihad. That organization’s charter calls for the elimination of “the Zionist entity,” the establishment of an Islamic state “from sea to sea,” and “Jihad against the Jewish existence in Palestine”—right after Yael Korin’s twisted heart.

In addition to Women in Black, Korin is listed here by Al-Awda (the Palestinian Right to Return Coalition) as a “founding member of the Campaign to End Israeli Apartheid, Southern California.” Attach any vicious terminology to Israel—“born in sin,” “war crimes,” “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid”—and Yael Korin is there to endorse and propagate it. Her pathological loathing of Israel and Israelis, if not literally murderous (and that is an open question), certainly encompasses identifying with those who do murder Israelis en masse. Psychologically speaking she is a frightening phenomenon of reality-distortion and evil, exploiting her democratic freedoms to spread her message of incendiary hatred.

Joel Amitai is an independent researcher and filmmaker. Reach him at jamitai40@gmail.com.

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