Odeh Misleads Tel Aviv Leftists Before Election

Ayman Odeh, head of the Arab party, the Joint List, held a campaign meeting at a coffee shop in Tel Aviv, seeking to persuade Jewish leftists to vote for them today. I have a lot of problems with this man and other members of the Joint List, but I ask that they at least do not lie. At least refrain from distorting the facts to make yourself seem more palatable to those who are ignorant of what you are trying to sell. And Odeh lied about the Palestinian flag. Here is what he said:

While the Palestinian flag may be a “problematic symbol” due to its use by the Palestine Liberation Organization and the complicated and often violent history between Israel and the Palestinians, Odeh said, it actually predates Israel’s 1948 establishment.

It actually does not. There was a flag that resembles the flag now used by the Palestinian Authority and, before that, by the PLO. But it did not predate 1948. And it did not even originate from the flag of Jordan with which it is identical minus the star in the red triangle.

In fact, a simple look at Wikipedia shows that the flag does not predate the establishment of the modern State of Israel.

The flag used by the Arab Palestinian nationalists in the first half of the 20th century is the flag of the 1916 Arab Revolt. The origins of the flag are the subject of dispute and mythology. In one version, the colours were chosen by the Arab nationalist ‘Literary Club’ in Istanbul in 1909, … Another version credits the Young Arab Society, which was formed in Paris in 1911. Yet another version is that the flag was designed by Sir Mark Sykes of the British Foreign Office. Whatever the correct story, the flag was used by Sharif Hussein by 1917 at the latest and quickly became regarded as the flag of the Arab national movement in the Mashriq.

On October 18, 1948, the flag of the Arab Revolt was adopted. A modified version (changing the order of stripes) was officially adopted as the flag of the Palestinian people by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964. On November 15, 1988 the PLO adopted the flag as the flag of the State of Palestine. [Well, we do know that Wikipedia is pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist so they give themselves the liberty of calling the Palestinian Authority a state. It is not. It is a wannabe state.]

The original flag was called the Flag of Hejaz or the Flag of the Arab Revolt, when the Arabs revolted against the Ottoman Empire. It was adopted by the PLO in 1964 — the green and white were interchanged and the flag was made longer.

True to form, Odeh distorts the facts to try to proclaim that there has always been a Palestinian people, this time claiming that the flag that represented the Arab Ummah was a Palestinian flag. Nice try, Odeh. I just wish that gullable Jews who want to appease those who want to destroy our Jewish state, did not swallow everything hook, line and sinker.

Odeh twists things on their head. His answer to the Israeli cry that there was never a Palestinian people before the PLO and Oslo invented one is to claim there is no Israel.

To Odeh, the flying of the Palestinian flag at demonstrations inside Israel is a much simpler issue. “The establishment has tried to turn us all into a creature called ‘Arab Israelis,’” he reminded his audience, “but just as there is no such thing as ‘Jewish Israeli,’ there is also no such thing as ‘Arab Israelis.’”