Knesset set to impeach Arab politician over tweet about hostages

The Knesset is poised to impeach leading Arab politician Ayman Odeh on Monday, a move that would further marginalise the Arab minority, which is already plagued by inferior legal status.

But the veteran left-wing Hadash party leader, known best for his espousal of a two-state peace compromise and calls for Jewish-Arab cooperation, is thriving on the confrontation, which is seen as having broad implications for the future degree of pluralism in increasingly extremist Israeli politics.

Odeh told The Jewish Independent that he sees these days as a moment of opportunity.

“I want this crisis to lead to a strengthening and broadening of Arab-Jewish partnership for equality in the homeland and respecting the national rights of the two peoples,” Odeh said in an interview on Tuesday, a week after the Knesset’s House Committee voted 14 to 2 to recommend that he be expelled from parliament over a social media post deemed to support terrorism.

Unless there is a change of heart by centrist opposition party Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid, who backs Odeh’s ouster, it is likely that the required 90 out of 120 MKs will expel Odeh. If that happens, he plans to appeal to the Supreme Court, which itself has been moving rightward.

Odeh, who ironically has been under fire within Hadash for opposing greater radicalism, said he has been buoyed by thousands of messages of support from Jews, including from artists and filmmakers, leading writers, and street protest activists. The latter are reportedly warning centrist politicians who joined the Likud party expulsion initiative that they will no longer be welcome at their demonstrations.

Taking a leaf from the book of the late left-wing Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Odeh says that the occupation is fuelling a “fascistisation” of Israel that is spreading through all parts of the state. His impeachment, he believes, is part of this.

“The settlement enterprise and the messianists want to take over the court and to harm Arabs. The order of the day is to struggle against fascism and struggle against the occupation,” he told TJI.

However, Avihai Boaron, the Likud party legislator and settlement activist who launched the impeachment drive, sees Odeh as a “supporter of terrorism” who must be removed because of his social media post. The massive and brutal Hamas attack of October 7 made clear that “it is forbidden to remain silent in the face of support by Knesset members for terrorism,” Boaron said.

Written in January during a ceasefire in the Gaza war, Odeh’s post appeared to place released Israeli hostages and released Palestinian prisoners on an equal footing. “I am glad over the freeing of the hostages and the prisoners. Now we must release the two peoples from the yoke of occupation. All of us were born to be free,” it read.

Both the Knesset legal adviser and the representative of the state attorney told the House committee that Odeh’s post offers no basis for impeachment. But in a country that is moving further and further Right, the chance at anti-Arab populism was too much to resist for Yesh Atid.

It joined with the hard-right to brand Odeh as the enemy of the people. Lapid was quoted as telling Israeli journalists after the committee vote that “anyone who speaks like this should not be a member of the Knesset”.

Salim Brake, a political scientist at Israel’s Open University, says the campaign against Odeh is trumped up and extremely dangerous. “Ayman Odeh’s main characteristic is being moderate and being in favor of partnership between Jews and Arabs,” he told TJI. “Parts of Hadash have become radicalised and therefore they attack Odeh. He is the moderate pole of the party.”

Odeh’s calls for partnership have not thus far not altered the basic equation stacked against the Arab minority, long viewed or depicted as a potential fifth column.

Longstanding discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel became legally entrenched in 2018 with the passage by an earlier Netanyahu coalition of the Nation State Law, which effectively defines anyone who isn’t Jewish as a second-class citizen. The deterrent effect on Arabs electing members of the Knesset, which impeachment would create, would mark a further downgrading of their citizenship status.

House Committee chairman Ofir Katz, from Likud, could not conceal his satisfaction after the vote. “Odeh legitimised terrorism and I am happy that there are parties in the opposition who understand that in any functioning country, Odeh would rot in prison for what he wrote and be stripped of his citizenships” Katz said.

But Brake says the real problem is that “parts of Likud are fascist and Lapid is joining them as a big racist who collaborates with fascists and contributes to the destruction of democracy.

“We are in a state of collapse. Complete fascism lies ahead,” Brake said.

Odeh told TJI: “They attack me because I address Jews... I’m an Arab democrat who wants to build partnership with Jews and to have states for each. They don’t want an Arab democrat.”

He said he was proud of his social media post “because I am looking at the two nations and not just one nation. The most difficult thing during a war is to speak of the interests of two nations. I speak of both of them as equal and say that all of us must be freed from the yoke of occupation because all of us were born to be free.

“I am happy about the freeing of the hostages and of the prisoners. This is a statement of human values that rises above a deep, deep pain and searches for a historic compromise with rights for the two peoples.”

Still, Odeh can be jarring to Israeli ears. He refers to the nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of expulsion during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war as a “crime against humanity” that he says is “ongoing” because it was followed by military occupation of Arabs inside Israel and then in the West Bank and Gaza.

“Anti-democracy is unacceptable. But there are two peoples. The Jews crystalised as a nation and they deserve self-determination. The Palestinians should have a state. There should be one state alongside the other and you have to struggle so that [these states] will be democratic,” Odeh said.

Odeh says the campaign against him also stems from a desire to weaken the Supreme Court as part of what is known by left-wing Israelis as the “coup” or an attempt by Netanyahu’s coalition to remove checks on its power. If it overturns impeachment, the Court can be criticised by the anti-democratic forces for defying the will of the people.

And that could make it reluctant to overturn, as it has in the past, the inevitable disqualification before elections of the Arab nationalist Balad party, thereby lowering Arab turnout in the next election.

“If impeachment passes, they will get rid of any person they don’t like,” Odeh warns.

The Gaza war hung over the TJI interview, which came right after defence minister Yisrael Katz openly announced an Israeli plan to commit what human rights lawyers view as a massive war crime. The army, he proclaimed, will concentrate all of Gaza’s population into a “humanitarian city” in southern Gaza. Palestinians will be barred from exiting this concentration area, he stressed. Some will be transferred out of Gaza to other countries.

Odeh proposes a different approach: “I call on Jewish society to stand up and say: ’There is a limit. We will not accept this. We need another direction entirely.’

“What is needed?” Odeh asked. “To stop the war, to make a comprehensive deal on hostages and prisoners, to topple the government, to have state living alongside state in peace, and to have equality between Arabs and Jews in the country.”

“Is this difficult?” he asked. "Is this racism?”