On Israel ousting its Arab Knesset Member

Tomorrow, Ayman Odeh will be impeached

In January, Member of Knesset (MK) Ayman Odeh posted on X/Twitter in Hebrew:

"Happy about the release of hostages and [Palestinian] prisoners. From here, both peoples need to be freed from the burden of the occupation; we were born free."

Sounds reasonable enough, right? Here we have an MK who is happy for people to be released, to go home to their families, and to wish for a future in which both peoples can live free of military rule and supremacy. He clearly recognizes the humanity and suffering of all people in Israel/Palestine. However, the response by fellow MKs was to accuse him of promoting terrorism and to vote to kick him out of the Knesset, which is now in progress.

Ayman Odeh is an Arab Member of Knesset and head of the joint Hadash-Ta’al party. Hadash is the only Arab-Jewish party in Israeli politics. It is also the only party in the Knesset that is genuinely still using the platform of electoral politics as a means to try to end the occupation and Jewish supremacy and work towards equality for both peoples.

I've worked with Odeh many times—his convictions are real and his commitments are seen through his actions. It's ludicrous for anyone to think Odeh, who has worked for years for a joint future between Arabs and Jews, is a supporter of nationalistic violence.

But that doesn't mean he's not a threat. People like Ayman Odeh, who stand for a shared future and against fascism, occupation, and Jewish supremacy, are a real threat not just to the government, but to the state as a whole. After all, with 7 million Jewish people and 7 million Palestinians under its control, the state functions to ensure the maintenance of Jewish privileges over Palestinian human and civil rights.

Yesterday, Opposition Chairman Yair Lapid said in an interview with "Meet the Press" hosted by Amit Segal and Ben Caspit that he will vote in favor of dismissing MK Ayman Odeh from the Knesset, effectively guaranteeing his dismissal tomorrow. The Opposition just handed this win to the coalition.

The coalition needed 90 votes to oust Odeh that’s 75% of all sitting Mks. This is overwhelming majority has agreed to impeach Odeh over charges clearly motivated by racism.

This attack on Ayman Odeh isn't surprising, nor is the decision of the Opposition to vote in favor of it, even though it's a ‘win’ for the coalition.

This vote isn't about 'supporting terror', despite that being the stated reason. Rather, it's another step in silencing critics of indefinite occupation, apartheid, and supremacy. It's anti-democratic at its core.

Instead of viewing Israeli politics from a spectrum of left to right, or opposition and coalition at any given time, we can understand it through three main camps. The first is the status quo camp, which wants to maintain Jewish supremacy between the river and the sea (which is all the land it controls), but doesn't necessarily care ideologically to annex. The second camp is the annexation camp, and they are both now the biggest camp and growing yet. This camp wants to formally annex the 1967 Palestinian territories while denying Palestinians political rights. They're growing because they're willing to address the reality head-on—their answer is annexation without equality, and outwardly looks to ethnic cleansing as an answer beyond indefinite military control.

The status quo camp includes Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid Party and Benny Gantz's National Unity Party. It also includes the Democrats party (a combo of Meretz and Labor), though they will likely vote against such an outwardly racist vote. At the same time, their leader, Yair Golan, advocated repeatedly for re-occupying southern Lebanon and does not believe in an end to the 1967 occupation, just an end to settlements.

While these two camps may view themselves as different ideologically, they agree that Palestinians, in the occupied territories and inside Israel, can have no genuine political power that could change the current status of exclusively one state between the river and the sea. Both believe wholeheartedly in Jewish supremacy as a political structure.

The third camp is the Equality Camp, which is both the smallest camp and is also shrinking into nothingness. This camp believes in equal rights for Jewish Israelis and Palestinians, whether through a two-state solution or one democratic state. Equality is the base. This camp once arguably including parties like the left-Zionist party Meretz, it has shrunk dramatically and now consists mainly of Arab parties, as even left-leaning Jewish parties have abandoned genuine equality positions. I'd argue that the bar being 'equality' is pretty low for a country that calls itself a democracy. And yet, the only party left in this camp that is currently in the Knesset is Hadash-Ta’al, Odeh's party. And now he's about to be impeached.

(Note: the Arab party Ra'am is also in the Knesset today, but they do not seek to upend the current status quo. Rather, they will support the status quo in exchange for more services and civil rights to their community, specifically the Bedouin community. They are not an active player in the equality camp.)

We can see these camps in other examples as well. In July 2024, when the Knesset passed a resolution rejecting Palestinian statehood, it wasn't just Netanyahu's coalition that supported it. Opposition parties like Benny Gantz's National Unity and Lieberman's Yisrael Beytenu backed it too. Even Yair Lapid's "center-left" party, which will now vote to oust Odeh, simply left the room rather than vote against it.

This reality can't simply be placed on Israel's current ultra-nationalist government. Another government has made overwhelmingly similar decisions.

In 2021, a diverse coalition formed a government without Netanyahu, promising change. It included Meretz, Labor, and Ra’am. What changed? Ultra-Orthodox parties lost influence, social benefits increased, and Netanyahu was sidelined.

What didn't change? The occupation deepened, settler violence increased, new settlements were built, and six Palestinian civil society organizations were baselessly labeled as terrorist groups and outlawed, to name a few.

That ‘change government’ collapsed over—tellingly—a vote on emergency measures that allow settlers to live under Israeli civilian law while residing outside Israel's borders.

The impeachment of Ayman Odeh is simply the next step in concentrating political power from all arenas to ensure that Palestinian political power remains minimal.

Many people on the Jewish radical Israeli left and many Palestinian citizens think this move is relatively positive—simply because it calls Israel's bluff of being a true democracy for its Arab citizens at the least. As is, Jewish parties overwhelmingly refuse to sit in coalition with Arab parties (again, Ra'am being the exception in 2021, not the rule). I don't disagree with them, but I do worry about what's to follow. The more participatory channels are closed to Palestinian citizens of Israel, the more likely we are to see an increase in violence. State violence towards Palestinian citizens of Israel is already increasing and likely at its highest since the first few years of Israel's founding when it placed all Palestinian citizens of Israel under martial law and had thousands of Palestinian men in internment centers. Odeh’s impeachment is yet another move of many that signal to Palestinian citizens of Israel—you are an enemy before you are a citizen.

And as Odeh said in his response during his impeachment hearings, our answer must be just as clear:

"We will stand firm against fascism, against Kahanism, against Jewish supremacy, against the occupation, and against all the anti-democratic forces that are trying to silence us. This [attempted ousting] only requires us to fight harder, Jews and Arabs together."