A Palestinian Israeli Leader for Peace
By David Remnick
The New Yorker
What is required of a saint is a radiant reflection of the holy and a capacity for miracles. What is required of a political saint is an intimate familiarity with the interrogation room. Ayman Odeh, the foremost leader of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, has read deeply in the lives of the political saints—Martin Luther King, Jr., especially—and he is not shy about suggesting comparisons, if only as a matter of aspiration. The Shin Bet, the Israeli internal intelligence agency, first pulled him in for questioning when he was a kaffiyeh-wearing teen-ager in the thick of an uprising. He is now a middle-aged politician in a suit, a legislator preaching the coexistence of Arab and Jew in a time of dashed hopes, almost daily acts of terror, and regional chaos.
Odeh grew up in Haifa, a mixed city on the Mediterranean coast. He is forty-one. Last March, he emerged from provincial obscurity amid an unexpected upheaval in Israeli politics. The small political parties that represent the Arab population in Israel—1.7 million out of more than eight million—reacted to a stringent new election law designed by the right wing to limit their presence in the Knesset, the national legislature. Submerging their ideological differences, they formed a coalition, called the Joint List. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was trailing in the polls going into the final week of campaigning, prodded his party, Likud, on Election Day by sounding the tribalist alarum. Arab voters, he warned, “are coming out in droves.” Thanks in part to Netanyahu’s fearmongering, the right-wing parties won just enough votes to form a government. But the Joint List, with Odeh as its leader, also scored a victory, becoming the third-largest bloc in the Knesset, behind Likud and the centrist Labor Party-led Zionist Union.
Odeh reads soft, undynamic. Pudgy and mild-mannered, he is eager to please, quick to embrace, and, when he is offended or patronized—something I saw happen more than once in the halls and offices of the Knesset—he recedes, wincing slightly, as if experiencing an unpleasant digestive event. One morning, we arrived together at the Knesset building, in Jerusalem, and Odeh pointed out the portraits on the walls of the founders of the state: David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, Golda Meir. Israel is seventy-five-per-cent Jewish, and, to the majority of its citizens, these are figures as revered as Washington, Adams, and Lincoln are to Americans.
“The first day I was here in this hall and I saw these pictures, I felt as if I were choking,” Odeh told me. These were the figures, he said, who were responsible for what Palestinians call the nakba, the “catastrophe” of defeat and exile. In 1947-48, the Palestinians rejected a United Nations plan to create a Jewish state and an Arab state by partition, and, together with the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, launched a war against the newly declared State of Israel. In defeat, around seven hundred thousand Palestinians either fled their homes or were forcibly driven out of the country. Some modern historians describe the moment as ethnic cleansing. Odeh’s family, which had roots three hundred years deep in the Carmel Mountains, around Haifa, managed to stay. After that first day in the Knesset, as head of the Joint List, Odeh called his parents and said, “What am I doing here?”
Odeh’s father was a construction worker, and his parents brought him up on a cultural diet of Arabic poetry and the songs of Umm Kulthum, and on the political legacy of lost homeland. The family was Muslim yet secular. Odeh attended a Christian school, because it was the best in the area. His Hebrew is nearly as fluent as his Arabic.
One day in 1988, when he was thirteen, Odeh sneaked out of his parents’ house at 5 A.M. to catch a bus to a demonstration in Sakhnin, a town in the Lower Galilee. This was the time of the first intifada, a Palestinian uprising in Gaza, the West Bank, and inside Israel, particularly in the Arab towns and cities. It was March 30th, Land Day, the commemoration among Palestinian Israelis of a 1976 rally when six Arabs were killed during protests against the Israeli government’s widespread expropriation of Palestinian-owned land. In Sakhnin, Odeh heard Tawfiq Ziad, a famous poet and politician from Nazareth, speak, and he was moved by the sight of thousands of people gathered to demand equal rights for Arabs inside Israel and a state for the people living in the occupied territories. “This moment entered my bloodstream, my flesh,” he said.
When Ayman made it back home, late that night, his father, a gentle man who had never hit him before, brandished his belt. “Where have you been?” he thundered.
The next three years “were the most beautiful of my life,” Odeh said. “I felt completely identified with the struggle.” At one student assembly, he got up and recited lines against the occupation by the Arab Druze poet Samih al-Qasim. “The gist of it was that the more the occupier harms us, the sooner the occupation will end,” he told me.
Two days later, Odeh said, “I was ‘invited’ to be interrogated by the Shin Bet.” He was sixteen. “For us, the Shin Bet was the most terrifying thing imaginable. It was a name you only whispered. When my parents heard about it, they almost collapsed. They tried to bolster my spirits, but they were also yelling, ‘What did you do?’ I was both terrified and proud. If the Shin Bet was bothering to call me in, it meant that I was a serious patriot.” At demonstrations, Odeh carried a placard that read, “Two States!” “I was beaten for that,” he said, recalling that at the time only parties of the far left talked of “two states for two peoples.”
At the Shin Bet offices in Haifa, Odeh was questioned by two interrogators, who made clear that they had already compiled a substantial file on him. “They knew everything about me,” he said. “They told me I was working against the State of Israel. My father was allowed to be with me, and he kept saying, ‘But he’s only a child. I promise to take care of him and keep careful watch.’ After two hours, they let me go, but not before they said, ‘We’ll call you again.’ My father was so frightened by the whole experience that when we got in the car to go home we didn’t get a hundred metres before he crashed the car.
“I was called three more times by the Shin Bet. They never hit me. But they succeeded in two things. I isolated myself from my friends—I became much more introverted. And I had the sense the Shin Bet was watching me no matter where I went. When I went to the bus station and I saw some guy in sunglasses, I just assumed he was Shin Bet.”
New members of the Knesset give a “maiden speech.” In his, Odeh told the legislators not only about his dream of Arab civil rights and equality in the Land of Israel; he also told them about his past. Among the Knesset members listening was Yaakov Peri, who had been the head of the Shin Bet when Odeh was a teen-ager being interrogated. When Odeh stepped into the hallway off the Knesset floor, Peri stopped him and put his hands on his shoulders. “You are a brave man,” he said.
“We looked one another in the eyes, and it was quite a surprising moment, not one that I ever expected,” Peri, one of many former intelligence and security chiefs in Israel who have been critical of the Netanyahu government, said. “I thought of his election as a wonder of democracy—though I’m sure that Ayman sees it as something a little different.”
Source: www.newyorker.com