Reform, Arab-Israeli leaders call for ‘difficult, honest’ conversation

The head of the Reform movement in the United States and a leading Arab-Israeli lawmaker said in a joint statement that Arabs and Jews had a shared future that required “honest and difficult” conversations.

The statement by Ayman Odeh, head of the Joint (Arab) List, the third largest Knesset faction, and Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, came at the end of a conference Sunday in New York organized by the Haaretz daily and the New Israel Fund, and just two days after Jacobs had expressed disappointment in Odeh for scrapping at the last minute a meeting with Jewish leaders.

“The only future is a shared future,” the statement read. “We both understand the importance of honest, deep, difficult and necessary conversations. We were glad to meet today at the Haaretz conference to agree to work together for a better future.”

The statement came after Jacobs had expressed “deep disappointment” on Friday in Odeh’s refusal to enter a meeting with US Jewish leaders because it was taking place in space shared by the Jewish Agency for Israel.

According to the meeting’s organizers, Odeh entered the building’s lobby, but refused to go in, citing the fact that the offices on the floor with the Conference of Presidents also housed the Jewish Agency — a quasi-governmental organization that the Arab List claims participates in discriminatory practices against Israeli Arabs and Palestinians.

“I came here to represent the Arab public in Israel to American audiences,” Odeh later recounted in a statement. “As their representative, I cannot in good conscience participate in meetings in the offices of organizations whose work displaces Arab citizens, just as in the Knesset, we do not participate in the Ministry of Defense, the Foreign Ministry, and the Ministry of Aliyah and Immigrant Absorption.”

In a Facebook post, Odeh said, “I believe in the power of talking to one another, because isolation is the wrong way. But it isn’t that we have a problem with them; it is that they are the problem.”

“This was an opportunity for us to engage in the complexities of the issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the internal Jewish-Arab issues in Israel,” Jacobs said Friday.

A meeting with the Presidents Conference “would have provided another opportunity to further the conversation and come closer to a solution,” he added.

Odeh returns to Israel Tuesday after a weeklong visit to the United States intended in part to recruit US Jews to the cause of advancing Arab equality in Israel. In Washington, he met with administration officials, members of Congress, and representatives of liberal think tanks.