Joint List leader talks of ‘understanding Shoah’

Joint (Arab) List chairman Ayman Odeh says on a Channel 2 profile show that in his younger years he understood, “finally, to what degree the Holocaust is the Jewish people’s watershed event.”

Odeh, the soft-spoken leader of a list of MKs comprised of atheist communists Hadash (to which he belongs and where his colleague is veteran Jewish MK Dov Khanin) as well as nationalistic parties United Arab List and Balad, says “I visited all the museums, I met with Holocaust survivors, and wonder how it is that of all people the Jewish accept a reality of persecuting a minority living in their midst.”

He also recounts many incidences of being questioned by the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) in his youth. “This brought me to a very difficult psychological state, to a state of paranoia,” he recalls, teary-eyed. “I remember I used to get off a bus and if there was someone sitting in the station I remember thinking maybe they were from Shin Bet and came for me.”

The leader of what has become a formidable political force (third largest in the new Knesset after Likud and Zionist Union), Odeh defined Yisrael Beytenu Avigdor Liberman as “a Mark of Cain on the forehead of Israeli society.” The usual calm man admits that some of his exchanges with Liberman “made me very angry, almost full of rage.”

He says that it took him a long time to realize that despite all their military victories, Jewish Israelis still feared the Arab minority in their midst. “My goal is that Jews feel safe in their country,” he says.

Asked whether his vision of an equal state threatens its Jewish majority, Odeh answers “have people fallen on their heads here? You are 80% [of the population], you are strong, internalize it already.”