The head of the Joint Arab List Ayman Odeh has recently become all of what the Left wants to see in an Arab MK.
The Left's fantasies have been thrust upon him. Leftwingers have ignored his sympathetic statements toward Hezbollah and other murderous terrorist groups because they want to convince themselves and others that he is a peace-loving man. They were willing to ignore all this just so he would support Blue and White leader Benny Gantz and help him get the presidential nod to form a government.
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Odeh has agreed to play that role. Throughout the last election campaign, he promised that his only goal was to achieve coexistence. He has managed to transform himself and, at least in Hebrew, it worked.
Last week, with his typical Martin Luther King terminology, he praised a group that had petitioned the High Court of Justice to prevent hospitals from imposing dietary restrictions on visitors during Passover.
That group has not recognized Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state and has not endorsed its Zionist ethos. Its involvement in the petition should not come as a surprise, as was as its strong embrace of Odeh, the poster boy for coexistence, the kind of coexistence in which Jews respect Arab traditions, but not vice versa.
"Coexistence is created through mutual understanding and cultural acceptance, not petty coercion and the search and seizure of bread on Passover," Odeh tweeted. This is a funny thing for him to say considering that the High Court petition has resulted in hospitals being forced to allow bread into their premises on Passover. This is perhaps as far away as possible from mutual understanding and very close to "petty coercion."
This hypocrisy is just mind-boggling. He has never said anything of that nature when police officers, under instructions from the Islamic Waqf, stopped Jewish worshippers from carrying flags and privately praying on Temple Mount.
This self-proclaimed icon of tolerance and mutual respect asked the Blue and White leader to prevent jews from stepping on Temple Mount altogether as a condition for supporting a would-be minority government. I guess in his ideological book of tolerance, Jews contaminate the holy place and their very presence is a crime.
Mr. Odeh, do you want cultural acceptance? Perhaps you should start by recognizing that the Temple Mount is holy in Judaism, that Jews prayed to return to it for 2,000 years and that we will never give it up. Or maybe you actually know all this and too scared to admit it.
