Arab Joint List leader: I want to be prime minister

The Joint List leader said he wants to lead Israel despite being the head of a party that favors the “right of return,” a policy that both sides of Israel’s political aisle agree means the end of the Jewish state. 

By World Israel News Staff

Knesset Member Ayman Odeh, head of the Joint List, an alliance of Arab-Israeli parties, said he wants to be prime minister during a Wednesday interview with Kan, Israel’s public broadcaster.

“Wait? Who? I didn’t understand. You want to be prime minister? That’s your ambition?” the interviewer asked, clearly surprised by his reply. “From your point of view, you want to be prime minister?”

Odeh then compared Israel to the U.S. “If we compare our situation to the period in the ’60s, the distance between the blacks and the whites was greater. That is to say, in another 40 years there would be a black president. In another 40 years, there will be an Arab prime minister in Israel,” he said.

“You think that could happen,” the interviewer asked.

“We’re not in the period of Obama, but we want to be in the period of Martin Luther King,” Odeh said.

That Odeh would aspire to be prime minister will strike the vast majority of Israelis as far-fetched at the very least. His party Hadash advocates the “right of return” for Palestinian “refugees” who fled Israel during the War of Independence.

It’s a policy rejected by both sides of the political aisle in Israel as one which would bring about the end of the country as a Jewish state by upsetting the demographic balance.

Hadash is currently in an alliance with other Arab parties, including Balad, which openly opposes Israel as a Jewish state, hoping to transform it into a binational state of Jews and Arabs.