Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is untrustworthy and has intentionally harmed the Arab community in Israel on numerous occasions, Joint List leader MK Ayman Odeh (Hadash) said in meeting with The Jerusalem Post editorial staff on Monday, June 27. In this meeting Odeh asserted that it’s time for Israel to start treating Palestinian citizens as equals individually and as a national minority collectively in a true democracy, with no less than full citizenship and stop relating to them dismissively as “Israeli-Arabs.”
MK Ayman Odeh (Photo: Al Ittihad)
One of the problems of the government’s behavior, said Odeh, is that it has vacillated between supporting the advancement of the status of the Arab community on the one hand, manifested in Minister of Finance Moshe Kahlon’s affirmative action plans for its development, while on the other hand Netanyahu has repeatedly felt free to lead racist attacks against Arabs. “Beyond mere ideology, regardless of whether one is from the Left or the Right, it’s about being credible,” said Odeh, who has been struggling as leader of a parliamentary faction that incorporates different parties with various ideological approaches to encourage economic and social equality in Israel.
One of the main issues Odeh said he had wanted to deal with after being elected in 2015 was resolving the looming threat by the state to demolish houses built without permits, a particularly acute problem in the Negev, but also endemic to the Arab community in all regions of the country. This problem has a discriminatory, Zionist ideological base: the state’s traditional and disingenuous reluctance to initiate regional planning for Arab areas, or even to seriously review and approve such plans initiated by the residents themselves or their municipalities; as a result, caught in a Catch-22 dilemma, tens of thousands of families have sought to ameliorate the lack of available housing by building houses on lots which they own but which have not been zoned for domestic construction. “Fifty thousand of our homes are unrecognized; what about planning and new neighborhoods for Arabs?” he asked. “We specifically proposed a two year cessation of any kind of demolition, during which the heads of the [Arab] municipalities would support a public call for people to stop building without permits. With the implementation of moratorium on both sides, we could work on regional plans; the central problem is the lack of planning.” Odeh claimed that the prime minister told him it was a valuable proposal, but at the same time Netanyahu has not stopped inciting against citizens from the Arab-Palestinian minority. “The man is fighting to hold onto his seat, but to the detriment of the country’s intelligence,” Odeh said.
