Joint List Chairman MK Ayman Odeh (Hadash) demanded on Tuesday, October 13, that Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein indict Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on charges of “inciting racial hatred and defamation” against the Arab leadership in Israel. In a letter he sent to the Attorney General, Odeh called for the prosecution of the Prime Minister for slander and inciting violence against Arabs.

Ayman Odeh, Chairman of the Joint List, during the last electoral campaign for the Knesset. In the background appears a graffiti slogan in Hebrew reading “Arabs out.” Beneath this, the red and white Joint List campaign sticker reads, in Hebrew and Arabic, “My response to racism!”

Odeh’s appeal to the Attorney General was in response to Netanyahu’s speech during the opening of the Knesset’s winter session on Monday evening in which he characterized the Arab leadership in Israel as “communists with a trail of Islamic State flags in their wake.” Taking the podium in the Knesset, Netanyahu said that Palestinian terrorism “does not come from frustration over the lack of a diplomatic solution, but from a desire to destroy us.”

In his letter to Weinstein, Odeh argued that “instead of disseminating lies, the Prime Minister should have expressed support for Knesset members from the Joint List, who strongly condemn the ISIS terrorist organization and who repeatedly voice their opposition to bloodshed and the killing of innocent people. In light of the tense situation in the region in general and in Israeli society in particular, the Prime Minister’s remarks fall within the realm of incitement to racism, and perpetuating false stereotypes.”

This is especially so, Odeh contended, “given the fact that MKs of the Joint List represents the overwhelming majority of the Arab public in Israel.” “Instead of taking responsibility for the situation and the danger we’re all in, the Prime Minister chooses to manipulate the Knesset stage to invent a blood libel and incite against an entire population,” said Odeh after sending his letter to the Attorney General.  It’s “hard to see this as anything but a deliberate attempt to increase the flames of hatred so rampant in the streets,” Odeh added. “The Prime Minister flings mud in an attempt to escape his responsibility for the current situation and to obscure the inescapable conclusion that it is his leadership which has led us here.”