Ayman Odeh : semi di pace

A Palestinian Israeli Leader for Peace

The politician Ayman Odeh is preaching coexistence in a time of dashed hopes.

newyorker.com|Di David Remnick

 Sintesi personale

 Ayman Odeh, il leader più importante dei cittadini palestinesi di Israele, ha letto  con profonda serietà Luther King, .E'  un politico di mezza età , un legislatore che predica la coesistenza tra arabi ed Ebrei  in un tempo di speranze deluse.

Odeh è cresciuto ad Haifa, una città mista sulla costa mediterranea. Nel marzo scorso è emerso dall'oscurità provinciale  determinando uno  sconvolgimento inaspettato nella politica israeliana. I piccoli partiti politici che rappresentano la popolazione araba in Israele-1,7 milioni  su  otto milioni hanno reagito alla  nuova legge elettorale, progettata dalla destra per limitare la loro presenza nella Knesset. Superando le loro differenze ideologiche  hanno formato una coalizione denominata Lista comune. Il primo ministro Benjamin Netanyahu, svantaggiato nei sondaggi ,ha avvertito:  "Stanno venendo a votare a frotte." Grazie anche a questo Netanyahu ha  vinto con pochi  voti sufficienti per formare un governo.La lista  comune con Odeh come leader è diventato  il terzo partito

  Una mattina, siamo arrivati ​​insieme alla  Knesset, a Gerusalemme, dove sono appesi  sulle pareti  i ritratti dei fondatori dello Stato: David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, Golda Meir.

"Il primo giorno che  ho visto queste foto, mi  sono sentito come soffocare , in quanto sono stati loro  i responsabili di quello che palestinesi chiamano Nakba, la "catastrofe" . Nel 1947-48, i palestinesi rifiutarono un piano delle Nazioni Unite per creare uno Stato ebraico e uno Stato arabo   e, insieme con gli eserciti di Egitto, Siria e Giordania, dichiararono guerra a   Israele. Circa settecentomila Palestinesi  lasciarono  le loro case o  vi furono  forzatamente costretti . Alcuni storici moderni descrivono questo evento con il termine di   pulizia etnica. La famiglia di Odeh è rimasta . Nel suo primo giorno alla Knesset, a capo della lista comune, Odeh chiamò i suoi genitori per dire  : "Che cosa sto facendo qui?"

La  sua famiglia è musulmana , ma laica. Odeh ha frequentato una scuola cristiana  e il suo ebraico è  fluente .

Un giorno nel 1988, quando aveva tredici anni, Odeh di nascosto si recò   a una  manifestazione a Sakhnin, una cittadina della Bassa Galilea. Erano i tempi della  prima intifada . Si commemorava  la Giornata della Terra per ricordare  quanto accadde nel  1976:   sei arabi  furono  uccisi durante le proteste contro l' esproprio del governo israeliano di terra di proprietà palestinese.A  Sakhnin  Odeh  ascoltò  Tawfiq Ziad, un famoso poeta e uomo politico di Nazareth.  "Questo momento è entrato nel mio sangue, nella mia carne  Fui convocato , a 16 anni dalloShin Bet.. Per noi, lo Shin Bet era la cosa più terrificante che si potesse immaginare. Ero terrorizzato  e orgoglioso. Se allo Shin Bet davo fastidio  voleva dire che ero un serio patriota. "Nelle manifestazioni Odeh portava  un cartello con la scritta " Due Stati " ed è stato  picchiato per questo. Infatti  solo i partiti della sinistra estrema erano favorevoli  a  "due stati per due popoli".

I nuovi membri della Knesset  fanno un "primo discorso". Odeh ha detto ai  legislatori del  suo sogno di uguaglianza in Terra d'Israele  e ha raccontato del  suo passato." Hadash, il partito di Odeh, supporta una soluzione dei due Stati; il Balad  vuole uno stato. C'è anche un piccolo, partito apertamente islamista chiamato Ra'am.

  Hadash   ha le sue radici nel vecchio Partito comunista israeliano. Ha sostenitori ebrei  e uno dei suoi cinque membri alla Knesset, Dov Khenin, è ebre0. Odeh rischia la disapprovazione di alcuni palestinesi, all'interno di Israele e fuori Israele , quando  sostiene la necessità di una  lotta nonviolenta e afferma che gli attentati suicidi della seconda intifada sono stati un "disastro". Le tensioni ideologiche all'interno della lista comune sono facili da intuire. Zoabi  ha dichiarato : 

"Penso che Ayman   resterà deluso. Puoi venire qui ogni giorno è vivere  nella costante sensazione di alienazione. Si lavora in un luogo che rappresenta una negazione completa della propria identità e  storia. Il messaggio  è questo : sei un estraneo qui, non fai parte dell 'istituzione.,ma contemporaneamente  fai  parte della Patria, E 'assurdo"

Il messaggio di Odeh è costruito intorno a una merce sempre più rara : la speranza. Egli si rifiuta di cedere a posizioni  di disperazione e di sospetto.

Dodici anni fa Netanyahu, mentre prestava servizio come ministro delle finanze, ha detto a una conferenza che il "problema demografico" per lo Stato di Israele non è nei territori occupati, ma, piuttosto, all'interno della Linea Verde, in città come Haifa e Acri, Nazareth e Umm al-Fahm. "Se i residenti arabi diventano meravigliosamente integrati e il loro numero raggiunge il trentacinque per cento o il quaranta per cento della popolazione totale, lo stato ebraico verrà annullato e diventerà uno stato binazionale"

Quando Netanyahu divenne Primo Ministro puntò a reprimere  le aspirazioni politiche della popolazione araba. "L'energia che il governo sta investendo verso questo obiettivo è più grande di quello che investe nel processo di pace e nel contrastare la minaccia nucleare iraniana", Aluf Benn ha scritto su Haaretz nel 2010. La campagna, realizzata da figure hard-destra come Avigdor Lieberman,  cerca di   far approvare leggi sulla  fedeltà e persino di eliminare la menzione della Nakba nei programmi scolastici   e punta a far riconoscere  Israele come "lo stato del popolo ebraico", privilegiando il primato  etnico  rispetto all' 'uguaglianza di tutti i suoi cittadini..Il disprezzo di Lieberman per la popolazione araba è agghiacciante.

Odeh è venuto negli Stati Uniti alcune settimane fa. Ha ottenuto una standing ovation dopo un discorso che ha fatto ad una conferenza sponsorizzata da Haaretz.Ha visitato il Dipartimento di Stato, il Times, The Nation, il Forward.C'è stato un momento di imbarazzo quando , invitato per incontrare la Conferenza dei presidenti delle maggiori organizzazioni ebraiche americane, a New York,,ha rifiutato in quanto  il luogo dell'incontro era nello stesso palazzo di un'agenzia per l'immigrazione in Israele. Era una linea rossa  per lui 

"Io non sono un 'intellettuale che spera di essere compreso tra un secolo. Sono un leader politico. Devo stare davanti della mia comunità.,ma non  troppo lontano da essa per non perderla  Il novanta per cento della mia gente si sarebbe opposta al mio incontro presso l'Agenzia Ebraica. La domanda è: dove tracciare queste linee, ciò  non è sempre chiaro. "

La leadership PA è prevalentemente musulmana, ma la messa di mezzanotte della vigilia di Natale a Betlemme è un grande evento . Abbas e tutti i suoi ministri si riuniscono presso la Chiesa della Natività e Odeh voleva unirsi a loro. Siamo partiti quella sera da Haifa per la Cisgiordania.Durante il viaggio mi ha spiegato : 

"La cosa che temo di più è che i palestinesi  disperino sempre di più nella soluzione di due Stati e chiedano un solo Stato Allora gli israeliani diranno: 'Vedi, ora vogliono Giaffa e Haifa!'

 Mentre camminavamo verso la Chiesa della Natività, a un certo punto  puntualizza : : "Io so che la tomba di Rachele è qui. I palestinesi sono vissuti qui da generazioni, ma gli ebrei hanno anche legami storici con questo posto. La fine dell'occupazione deve essere il primo grande passo, ma dopo molte cose potranno diventare possibili. Nel Vangelo di Marco, Gesù disse: 'Hai solo bisogno di credere.' Sono credente."

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.”

This is true. To be a Palestinian in the Israeli Knesset is infinitely more complex than being a member of, say, the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus. Just as Palestinian citizens almost never serve in the military, no Palestinian member of the Knesset will agree to be seated on committees related to defense, intelligence, foreign affairs, or the “absorption” of Jewish immigrants. There is an underlying hum of mutual suspicion in this arrangement. Many Jewish Israelis question the loyalty of Palestinian Israelis and insist that the Arabs in the country count their blessings and look harder at the varieties of misery and oppression across the border in the Arab world; the Palestinians point to the varieties of discrimination against them and to the receding support for democratic values among many right-wingers, particularly the ascendant tribe of religious nationalists in the settlements and elsewhere. The ideological range of the Joint List parties is a matter of emphasis: Hadash, Odeh’s party, supports a two-state solution; the more radical Balad has emphasized one state. There is also a small, openly Islamist party called Ra’am. All the parties are anti-Zionist.

Balad was started, in the mid-nineties, by a Marxist Palestinian named Azmi Bishara, who moved increasingly to the left and was routinely accused by his opponents of supporting foreign enemies of Israel. In 2007, he fled to Qatar. The most prominent member of Balad now is Haneen Zoabi, who is vilified on the right as a “traitor” for her participation in various protest actions against the state, including the Marmara flotilla, five years ago, which defied the blockade of the Gaza Strip. Zoabi has said that a nuclear Iran is far less dangerous than Israeli nuclear hegemony in the Middle East, and that Palestinians who kidnap Israelis are not terrorists, and “see no other way to change their reality.”

Odeh is the leader of Hadash, which has its roots in the old Israeli Communist Party. It has Jewish supporters, and one of its five Knesset members, Dov Khenin, is Jewish. Odeh risks the disapproval of some Palestinians, inside Israel and out, when he argues for nonviolent struggle and says that the suicide bombings of the second intifada were a “disaster.” The ideological tensions within the Joint List are easy to sense. Zoabi and others well to Odeh’s left clearly think that his emphasis on conciliation will come to nothing in an Israel where the political drift is ever to the right and the most successful political movement in the country is, arguably, the settlers of the West Bank.

“I think Ayman is going to be disappointed,” Zoabi told me one afternoon at the Knesset. “To come here every day is to live with a constant feeling of alienation. You work in a place that represents a full denial of your identity and your history. This place gives a hundred different messages that you are a stranger here, not part of the institution. At the same time, you are part of your homeland, not a stranger in any way. It’s absurd. You are part of the history and the geography of this land, but you have to explain your very presence.”

After the third or fourth time that Odeh was interrogated by the Shin Bet, he fell into a paralyzing depression. “I’d lost the joy of life,” he said. His father reminded him that the family had close friends in Romania. “Maybe you should go there to study and come back with the smile back on your face,” he told his son.

From 1993 to 1997, Odeh studied law at the University of Craiova. There he took part in pro-Palestinian rallies, learned Romanian, and read the memoirs of political thinkers and revolutionaries from the West. “When I read Malcolm X, I didn’t agree with it all, but I inhaled it, I connected to his rage,” he told me.

By the time he came home, he said, “I was like one of those windup cars, all ready to go.”

Putting aside his legal studies, Odeh became a member of the Haifa City Council; at twenty-three, he was one of the youngest city-council members in Israel. He also started a Hadash youth movement. His rhetoric was still influenced by the armed struggle in the occupied territories and by revolutionary voices among Palestinian Israelis.

“I would go to the market in Haifa, and Arab shopkeepers would say to me, ‘These things that you’re saying, it gives the Jews a reason not to come shop here,’ ” Odeh recalled. “It taught me eventually that I had to think about the big issues but also about the everyday lives of the people who are living these issues.

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“Eventually, I moved from a place of anger toward the Jews of Israel toward a place of embrace,” Odeh went on. The mid-nineties, an era of peace talks and possibility, allowed Odeh to believe in the prospect of transformation. “My biggest goal became to bring the weight of and the voice of the Arabs into the Israeli political sphere,” he said.

In his youth, Ayman Odeh paid a price for his idealism. Others paid a higher one.

Asel Asleh was a charismatic, intelligent boy who grew up in Arraba, an Arab village in the Lower Galilee. His father owned a grocery store. When he was fourteen, he joined Seeds of Peace, a cross-cultural nonprofit group that arose in the hopeful flush of the mid-nineties. This was the moment when Yasir Arafat, who had ordered terror attacks against Israelis for decades, and Yitzhak Rabin, who had reportedly ordered Israeli soldiers to “break the bones” of young Palestinians who hurled stones at them during the first intifada, signed a peace agreement and shook hands on the White House lawn. Under the auspices of Seeds of Peace, Asleh started meeting with Israeli Jews, Americans, Europeans, and Jordanians, at events held everywhere from a camp in Maine to a kibbutz in the Negev. Teen-agers gathered and talked about peaceful coexistence, conflict resolution, a just future. Asleh plastered the walls of his room with pictures of those earnest meetings and his new friends; he talked endlessly with the friends online. Asleh was an optimist, but, as he wrote in one note, he was wary of what would happen as he and his Jewish Israeli friends grew older:

Now I know who my friends are. In a few years from now they will become soldiers. They will go to the army to protect their families. But will they stay the same? Will they be the same Edi or Tzakhi that I knew?

By October, 2000, optimism had curdled. Arafat had rejected Ehud Barak’s proposals for a final-status agreement. The Palestinians said that the state they were being offered was an untenable scatter of cantons. The Israelis said that Arafat had been unmasked; they had “no partner” with whom to negotiate. Settlement building in the West Bank accelerated. Ariel Sharon, who was hoping to be Prime Minister, defied the pleas of the Palestinian leadership and visited the Temple Mount. The provocation proved provocative. Rioting ensued in Jerusalem, the occupied territories, and the Galilee, where the Palestinian Israeli population is most significant. Soon, the uprisings became known as the second intifada.

On October 1st, Palestinian leaders in Israel called for a general strike. The next day, Asel Asleh put on his green Seeds of Peace T-shirt and went to a demonstration just outside his village. His father testified that he had seen him chased by three Israeli police officers, hit with a rifle butt, and shot in the neck. Asleh died at a hospital nearby.

Ayman Odeh, as a young politician in the area, attended the funeral. In 2005, he married Nardin Asleh, Asel’s older sister.

In Haifa one morning, I went to breakfast with Nardin, Ayman, and their three small children at a popular café on Ben-Gurion Boulevard. The middle child, a four-year-old boy, is named for Nardin’s brother. The café had one of those caged-in gymborees with plastic no-injury slides and countless plastic balls to cushion every fall. While Ayman watched the children (and glanced at the constant roll of his e-mail), Nardin sat at a table picking at an omelette and talking about the past. She is an obstetrician-gynecologist at a hospital near Haifa. She speaks unaccented Hebrew, and her English (“thanks to watching ‘Friends’ and ‘The X-Files’ ”) is nearly flawless.

In the early nineties, Nardin was politically active. “But, after my brother was killed, politics felt so hopeless,” she said. “It was no longer just a matter of homeland or refugee; it was personal. What the hell can you do anymore?” Asel’s death “ruined our lives,” she said. “My parents never got over it, and neither did I. In a way, I lost my parents. They were depressed for years. It was only when I had children that any happiness at all returned to my life.”

Israeli officers had killed thirteen protesters during the “October events,” and for years Nardin’s father, Hassan, campaigned to bring them to justice. The government set up an investigative commission led by the Israeli jurist Theodore Or. The Or Commission pointed out that at various demonstrations around the country Arab protesters had hurled stones and Molotov cocktails, rolled burning tires, cut off important roads to traffic. It also admitted that there had been retaliatory attacks against Arab villages, and that underlying the demonstrations were “deep-seated factors” of discrimination over “generations” against the Arab population in housing, education, infrastructure, social services, and employment. The report criticized the Israeli security forces for using live ammunition. But, in the end, no one was charged with any crime, including the shooting of Asel Asleh.

“Nobody was brought to justice,” Nardin said. She glanced over her shoulder at Ayman, who was more engaged with his phone than with his kids. She smiled and rolled her eyes.

“When you deal with politics, you are always hopeful about results, I suppose,” she said. “But when your brother is killed like that it breaks you. I have no energy for politics, not the way Ayman does. I’m not encouraged—maybe that’s the right word. I think what he is doing is new and important. Until now, Israelis and Palestinians just kept going at each other with their conflicting narratives. Ayman won’t let them turn their backs on one another. He says let’s recognize what has happened but let’s talk. And he does it all and still manages to keep his Palestinian identity.”

Odeh’s message is built around the rarest commodity in the desert after water: hope. At a time when everyone speaks of a “one-state reality” and “no partner for peace,” Odeh refuses to give in to the region’s default positions of despair and suspicion. It is a wonder that he can sustain that sort of equipoise. When I was in Israel, the headlines were, it seemed, as they always were: a rash of stabbings, car rammings, and other assorted attacks against Jews by young Palestinians, leading to fear of a third intifada. Shin Bet officials said they had discovered Hamas cells in the West Bank gathering explosive devices and suicide vests. On New Year’s Day, a Palestinian Israeli opened fire on a crowd sitting outside a pub in Tel Aviv, killing two people. (Odeh condemned the murders.)

Settler zealots, for their part, continued to attack Palestinian villages. I had gone with Odeh to the West Bank village of Beitillu, where a group of settlers had come in the middle of the night, broken a window, and thrown gas bombs into the house of an Arab family that had a nine-month-old girl. On the side of the house, the settlers had spray-painted the slogan “Greetings from the Prisoners of Zion”—likely a reference to settlers who were in prison under investigation for burning down a house in the Arab village of Duma, in July, killing three members of a family, including an eighteen-month-old child. Not long afterward, a video of a wedding party in Jerusalem surfaced, showing Jewish extremists dancing, singing vengeful songs, and brandishing weapons and stabbing a photograph of the child. A few days later, the Israeli Ministry of Education excluded from high-school required-reading lists a novel called “Borderlife,” about a love affair between a Jew and a Palestinian, declaring that such a book “could do more harm than good.” Recently, Netanyahu demanded that Palestinian Israelis integrate completely into society: “Whoever wants to be Israeli should be an Israeli all the way, both in rights and in obligations, and the first and highest obligation is to obey the laws of the state.”

As we talked about these things, Nardin nodded with a sense of resignation.

“Ayman is a classic optimist. I am more pessimistic,” she said. “I’m afraid that things will crash down on him. And, as the mother of his children, I see that he is not really here to experience the growing up of his children. I say to him, ‘Are you going to free Palestine? Because, if you aren’t going to free Palestine, is it worth missing your kids’ childhood? You might pass a law here or there, but is it really worth it?’ ”

Finally, Odeh and the children came to the table to eat. The kids were still jazzed from their games. When Nardin was out of earshot, I asked Ayman about his immersion in politics. “I feel I’m making a mistake,” he said. “It’s a painful subject. I’m not proud of this situation. Sometimes I feel so bad that when I’m home I get everyone into one bed, so that I can feel them all around me.”

Odeh had been at the Knesset until 6 a.m., working on an economic-development package for Arab cities and towns, before leaving to see his family in Haifa. Later that night, we were going to drive across the country again to the West Bank, to Bethlehem, for midnight Mass. It was Christmas Eve.

Twelve years ago, Netanyahu, while serving as finance minister, told a conference that the “demographic problem” for the State of Israel was not in the occupied territories but, rather, within the Green Line, in such cities as Haifa and Acre, Nazareth and Umm al-Fahm. “If the Arab residents become wonderfully integrated and their numbers reach thirty-five per cent to forty per cent of the total population, the Jewish state will be cancelled out and become a binational state,” he said. “If their number remains around twenty per cent, as it is today, or even declines, but relations are harsh and contentious, then, too, the democratic fabric of our argument will be impaired.”

After Netanyahu became Prime Minister, critics on the left saw him directing his government’s ministers to repress the Arab population’s political aspirations. “The energy the government is investing toward that goal is greater than what it invests in the peace process or in thwarting the Iranian nuclear threat,” Aluf Benn wrote in Haaretz in 2010. The campaign, carried out by hard-right figures like Avigdor Lieberman, goes on. It seeks to pass loyalty laws and even to eliminate mention of the nakba in school curricula. Perhaps the most far-reaching of Netanyahu’s efforts has been to insist that Palestinians recognize Israel as “the state of the Jewish people,” emphasizing, his critics say, the primacy of its ethnic character over the ideal of extending equality to all its citizens.

Indeed, the Joint List came together as a result of the right wing’s effort to diminish the Palestinian presence in government. Last year, Lieberman, who had been Netanyahu’s foreign minister for six of the previous seven years and an advocate of “no loyalty, no citizenship” policies, was the main force behind the law limiting the Arab presence in the Knesset, raising the barrier for representation from two per cent to 3.25 per cent. That forced the Joint List parties to form their coalition. Lieberman’s contempt for the Arab population can be chilling. He is the head of a right-wing nationalist party called Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Is Our Home). In a televised electoral debate last February, Lieberman turned to Odeh and, without ever deigning to say his name, said, “Why are you in this studio and not in a studio in Gaza? Why are you running for the Israeli Knesset instead of being elected in Ramallah? Why are you here at all? You are not wanted here.”

“I’m very much welcome in my homeland,” Odeh replied. “I am part of the nature, the landscape.”

One day at the Knesset cafeteria (big portions, incredible noise level), I spoke to members about Odeh.

“The Netanyahu government acts to make sure that every Arab and lefty is somehow marked as disloyal or a traitor, and this creates a class of Arabs and ‘Arab-lovers,’ ” Tamar Zandberg, a member of the Knesset for the left-wing party Meretz, told me. As the center of political gravity has shifted to the right, she said, the capacity and the will to stand against the settlers and the rise of religious Zionism has diminished. “Look around you. No one here is really willing to face the voters and say, ‘We’re sorry. We’ve deluded you. And now, for the sake of the Israeli future, you have to leave your house and return to sovereign Israel.’ ”

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Isaac (Bougie) Herzog, who heads the Labor Party, moved right during his election campaign, assuring voters, in an ad, that he understood “the Arab mentality,” and that, as a member of Intelligence Unit 8200 in the Army, he saw Arabs through “the crosshairs” of a gun.

“Look, I have to walk on two legs,” Herzog told me. He could afford to defend a veterans’ group’s right to criticize the Israel Defense Forces, he said, but he would not side with the U.S. on the Iran deal. “I am a centrist, and, as a centrist, I have to do this. Yitzhak Rabin was a centrist, too.”

As I was talking to Herzog, Odeh set down his tray and joined us.

Herzog smiled and said, “Ayman, I love you, but I don’t have to agree with everything you say. You are a great hope. But if you like the bloc Rabin had in the nineties”—which included support from Arab deputies—“you have to remember that it was Rabin who said in the first intifada that the Army should break the bones of people throwing the stones.”

Odeh winced.

One table over, Avigdor Lieberman conferred with an aide.

“Ayman, when Lieberman passes you in the hall, does he say hello?” Herzog asked.

“No,” he said.

Herzog went on talking almost as if Odeh were not there. “I have my dilemmas and so does Ayman,” he said. “He has to attack extremist terror.”

Which was, for Odeh, maddening. He has attacked extremist terror. He has denounced the second intifada. He finds the breezy condescension of a Laborite like Herzog almost as hard to swallow as the contempt of someone like Lieberman.

“Herzog feels that he has to say a few good words about me, because I talk about universal values,” Odeh told me later. “But because he is part of the hegemony of the state that disregards Arabs he has to keep me over in a corner. There are many ways of pushing us there. There is the way of Lieberman and Netanyahu, who pretend we do not exist, and then there is the way of ‘Yes, but . . . ’ ‘Yes, Ayman Odeh is nice, but . . .’ ”

The mainstream attitude toward Odeh among his colleagues in the Knesset is often one of patronizing skepticism. Almost all are quick to say that they “like” him, but then the trouble begins. “I don’t know how much time he has,” Michael Oren, the former Ambassador to the U.S. and a center-right member of the Knesset, said. “Martin Luther King was supportive of the Constitution and the American right to exist. Would Ayman say the same things about the Jewish state? . . . We have a problem in this country with loyalty. Will Ayman say there was a Second Temple here? Will he say that there is no right of return? Or will he insist on staying well outside the Zionist consensus? I don’t think we should have a loyalty test, but there should be loyalty assumptions.”

Odeh is nearly imperturbable in manner. He reminded me of the way Ellison and Du Bois write about the “doubleness” of black consciousness, the emotional riptides that always have to be negotiated. But, when I repeated Oren’s comments, Odeh closed his eyes and steadied himself before answering.

“Look,” he said, finally. “What does Oren mean about being loyal to the essence and the assumptions of the state? Does that include the nakba and the expulsion of my people? Does it include military law and land confiscations in the first years of the state? I am loyal to universal values. I can throw it back at him and say the government is not loyal, because it is leading the state to disaster. It’s really a patronizing statement. It means justice is one-sided and everyone should fall into place. Who decides who is disloyal? The Jews should understand this above all people. They were condemned as disloyal all the time in Europe. Napoleon also demanded to know of the Jews, ‘Are you loyal?’ ”

Odeh came to the United States several weeks ago. He got a standing ovation after a speech he made at a conference sponsored by Haaretz. He won too casual comparisons to Dr. King when he visited King’s church in Atlanta, Ebenezer Baptist. He met with representatives of Black Lives Matter. He visited the State Department, the Times, The Nation, the Forward.

But the trip could not be counted an unmitigated success. Invited to meet with the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, in New York, Odeh arrived at its offices, on the East Side, and discovered that it shares a floor and some space with the Jewish Agency—an organization that, among other activities, helps settle new arrivals in Israel. That, Odeh told me, was “a red line.” He would not go upstairs.

Odeh’s host, Malcolm Hoenlein, could not fathom this logic. After all, Hoenlein told me later, he had been host to the mayor of Jenin, a city in the West Bank, and other Palestinians. Hoenlein went downstairs and met Odeh, but they got nowhere.

“How do you accept a paycheck every month from the Knesset?” he asked Odeh.

To Hoenlein, Odeh’s refusal was an affront. “I don’t expect him to pledge allegiance to the flag or sing ‘Hatikva,’ ” the Israeli national anthem, Hoenlein said. “His position really went beyond that. And his position was adamant.”

When I talked about the issue with Odeh, he subtly acknowledged that his logic was not beyond reproach. He works in a Zionist institution every day. He pays taxes to Israel, even if he refuses to identify himself straightforwardly as Israeli. But he was not apologizing. Rather, he was making plain his daily set of dilemmas.

“I am not some intellectual hoping to be understood a century from now,” he said. “I’m a political leader. I have to stand in front of my community. If I am a metre too far out in front of the people, I’ll lose them. Ninety per cent of my people would oppose my meeting at the Jewish Agency. The question is where to draw these lines, and it’s not always clear.”

Within the Joint List, the pressures on Odeh are from the left, from deputies like Zoabi who find his rhetoric of hope and coexistence insufficiently confrontational. But he sometimes feels pressure from the other side, from Arabs who see their lives in Israel, relative to the other countries in the region, as uncommonly free and prosperous.

Not long ago, Odeh was on a street in Nazareth, a largely Arab city, where he was about to do a standup television interview. It was the day after he had attended a demonstration there. Ali Salam, the mayor, pulled up in a car and shouted, “Ayman, you’ve ruined our city. Go back to Haifa. Get out of here.” He accused Odeh of scaring off shoppers from the market: “Not even one Jew was here today!” The video inevitably made its way to the Internet.

The Knesset is hardly a refuge. The day before Christmas, Odeh gave a short speech wishing Christians a happy holiday—“Chag samaech!”—and added greetings for Hanukkah and the birth of the Prophet Mohammed. Switching from Hebrew to Arabic, he said, “We are one people. We are brothers.”

One of the deputies shouted at him in Hebrew, “What are you saying?”

“I gave a greeting to our people in the historic homeland!” Odeh replied, in Hebrew. “Why can’t natives of this land celebrate their holidays?”

It was a fair question. The major Jewish holidays—Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Shavuot, Passover—are national holidays. Christmas and Eid al-Fitr are working days—in the Knesset and beyond. It’s a “symbolic” question but, Odeh said, “something to think about.”

When a right-wing deputy demanded that Odeh speak only in Hebrew, Odeh replied, in Hebrew, “The fact that I know Hebrew and you don’t know Arabic says something. You should want to be connected to other cultures in your own country.” Then the chair, by way of thanking Odeh and telling him his time was up, mispronounced his name three different ways.

The Palestinian leadership in the West Bank and Gaza understands that the Obama Administration almost certainly has given up trying to resolve the Israeli-Arab issue. The Israeli leadership is uninterested in a settlement—a majority of Netanyahu’s cabinet members are on the record opposing a two-state solution—and its Palestinian counterpart is weak, fragmented. Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, has a plummeting approval rating, and he is eighty, embittered, and exhausted.

The P.A. leadership is mostly Muslim, but midnight Mass on Christmas Eve in Bethlehem is a big event for them. Abbas and all his ministers gather at the Church of the Nativity, and Odeh wanted to join them. We set out that evening from Haifa for the West Bank.

“The thing I fear the most is that the Palestinians will grow so desperate about the impossibility of two states that they ask for one state,” Odeh said as we talked politics in the car. “Then the Israelis will say, ‘See, now they want Jaffa and Haifa!’ But all that will happen is that the two-state solution will be lost, and we will not gain a real one-state solution, either. It’s a one-state reality now, with parts of it being a military regime with an almost unimaginable gap socially.”

In Palestinian circles, the great unknown is who and what will follow Abbas, who has threatened repeatedly to resign. The usual candidates mentioned are flawed. Muhammad Dahlan, once a popular figure in Gaza, is widely considered corrupt. The head of intelligence, Majid Faraj, is unknown to most Palestinians. Salam Fayyad, the technocratic former Prime Minister, has great support in places like the International Monetary Fund but not on the streets of Jenin and Nablus. Finally, there is Marwan Barghouti, the most popular political figure in the West Bank. The only glitch is that Barghouti has been in prison since 2002, serving five life terms (plus forty years) for five counts of murder, including a role in the bombing of a restaurant in Tel Aviv. Not long after Odeh was elected to the Knesset, he visited Barghouti in prison. I asked him why.

“Barghouti is an interesting example of the different perspectives on the two sides,” he said. “I didn’t just visit him once. I visit him regularly. I see him as a real leader, the most loved Palestinian leader at the moment. But let’s be honest: Amir Peretz”—a former Israeli defense minister and deputy prime minister—“also visited him. Remember, even Nelson Mandela used arms. The worse crime is the occupation. I have no question that peaceful struggle is the way.”

We drove downhill through the winding streets of Bethlehem. Along with the Palestinian leadership, Odeh was scheduled to attend three Masses: Greek Orthodox, Anglican, and Catholic. As we walked toward the Church of the Nativity, which was built over the cave where Jesus is said to have been born, Odeh pulled me aside and began to talk about the city. At one point, he said, “I know that Rachel’s tomb is here. The Palestinians have been here for generations, but the Jews also have historical connections to this place. The end of occupation has to be the first big step, but after that many things are possible.”

It may be necessary to spend a great deal of time in Israel and Palestine to sense how rare such a spirit is—a Jew conceding the Palestinian roots in Jerusalem, a Palestinian recognizing Jewish roots in Hebron and Bethlehem. Odeh said, “In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus said, ‘You need only to believe.’ I’m a believer.”

With a couple of hours to kill before the final Mass, the Palestinians jumped into a line of black Mercedeses and S.U.V.s and raced to the P.A. offices in Bethlehem. There was a great deal of smoking, coffee drinking, gossiping. Odeh led me into a room to meet Abbas. And, on cue, the old man told me, “Ayman really is the wisest man of his generation. Even with this government, I think he can get a lot done in the Knesset.”

And what, I asked, can you get done in the coming year with the Obama Administration and Netanyahu?

Abbas smiled wearily. “I don’t know, but they tell me that for at least the next year it’s hopeless.”

And after?

“You should stay with Ayman,” he said. ♦