One morning, Israel's citizens woke up to discover Joint Arab List MK Ayman Odeh was no longer as affable a man as he had once been. The man who was depicted as a moderate leader revealed his true colors in a video in which he called for Arab Israeli police officers to lay down their weapons. All this of course transpired just days after the courageous Israeli hero Amir Khoury was killed in the Bnei Brak terrorist attack.
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There were those in the Israeli media who tried to convince us Odeh was a moderate voice in the Arab Israeli sector and someone with whom we could even build a shared future with in this land. Of course, they ignored the fact that the man was never truly moderate in the first place.
Here are just a few examples of his supposed "moderation." In 2013, as the secretary-general of the Hadash party, Odeh posted an article praising Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who he said, "presented a unique model of resistance." He said Nasrallah was the "head of the movement against the Israeli occupation and the man who defeated it in 2000 and proved himself professionally and through sacrifice in 2006." In addition, Odeh criticized the leader of the Islamic Movement's Northern Branch, an organization not exactly known for its moderate views, for refraining from using the term "sheikh" when referring to Nasrallah.
At a conference in the US in 2015, Odeh saluted the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, which he said put Israel in the spotlight of global opinion.
In interviews over the years, Odeh has refrained from condemning terrorist acts against IDF soldiers even when pressed to do so. "I will not choose who is and isn't legitimate," he retorted when asked whether he believed a bomb that explodes on an Israeli soldier in Hebron or on the Gaza Strip border was legitimate.
To this, we can add his visits to security prisoners, some of whom were sentenced to life in prison for murdering Israelis.
Yet Odeh's radicalism is best demonstrated in an incident that took place in 2016. Together with some of his fellow part members, Odeh chose to boycott the funeral of the late Israeli President Shimon Peres. Peres, a leader of the dovish, left-wing camp, was just as responsible for the Oslo Accords as the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. To Odeh, though, this made no difference. At the moment of truth, he chose not to attend.
Still, they ask in disbelief, how could our Odeh incite this way against Arab police officers? After all, this same Odeh was recently caught on camera hugging a veteran Israeli journalist.
Odeh was always a radical. He never even tried to hide his extremist views. There were simply those who insisted on shutting their eyes to what they saw.
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