The Knesset plenum is set to hold a contentious and decisive vote on Monday regarding the impeachment of Hadash-Ta’al chairman MK Ayman Odeh.
The measure, which requires a 90-MK majority, has never passed since the process enabling MKs to impeach a colleague was legislated in 2016. The only other impeachment to reach the plenum was of Hadash-Ta’al MK Ofer Cassif in 2024, but it only received 85 votes.
The law states that an MK may be impeached for “support for an armed struggle by an enemy state or a terrorist organization against the State of Israel.” Seventy MKs, including at least 10 from the opposition, must sign off on the request to launch proceedings. A “pseudo-judicial” hearing is then held in the Knesset Home Committee, and, if approved, it reaches the plenum. If the impeachment receives the necessary votes, Odeh will have the right to appeal to the High Court.
The official grounds for the impeachment is one post on X/Twitter by Odeh in January following the announcement of a hostage deal reached between Israel and Hamas in which he wrote, “Happy about the release of hostages and [Palestinian] prisoners, from here both peoples need to be freed from the burden of the occupation, we were born free.”
Likud MK Avichay Boaron, who initiated the process, argued in January that the equation of the hostages and Palestinian terrorists, as well as a call to “free the burden of occupation,” constituted a legitimization and call for violence. In January, however, Boaron did not receive the requisite number of signatures.
Ignoring legal advice, Boaron recycled the January petition in June, after Odeh stated at a rally, “After 600 days – there is an overwhelming majority among both peoples saying: If only these 20 months had never happened. This is a historic defeat for the Right, which was defeated in Gaza. Gaza won, and Gaza will win.”
The Knesset’s legal team warned Boaron that to add new evidence to the charge against Odeh, he would need to file a new petition, and could not recycle the January petition, which only applied to one post on X.
Boaron moved forward regardless and received the necessary support. In the two Knesset Home Committee hearings, on June 23 and June 30, Boaron and other coalition MKs rejected the legal advisory and listed a series of statements and actions, including from over a decade ago, as a basis for impeachment.
Boaron said during the hearing that the impeachment was not just a response to specific statements, but directed against “Odeh as a person and everything he represents.” The measure passed in the committee with support from right-wing and centrist opposition MKs.
The vote has created turmoil within both the coalition and opposition, as the ultra-Orthodox have threatened to boycott the vote due to the lack of progress on the haredi IDF service bill, and the opposition is split on whether or not to support the measure. The vote must be held in the plenum within three weeks of its passage in the committee, and therefore it cannot be postponed.
Haredi MKs from United Torah Judaism said on Sunday that they would decide in a party meeting on Monday afternoon, just before the scheduled vote. Without UTJ’s support, the coalition will with near certainty not reach the 90-MK threshold. A spokesperson for Shas did not respond to a query on Sunday about how the party intends to vote.
The vote also led to a fierce debate within the opposition and anti-government camp, with critics slamming the decision by some centrist MKs from Yesh Atid and Blue and White, including opposition leader MK Yair Lapid, to vote in favor of the impeachment.
Both parties announced that they would allow their MKs to vote according to their individual convictions. Other than Lapid, MKs Simon Davidson (Yesh Atid) and Pnina Tameno-Shete (Blue and White) supported the impeachment in the committee vote and are likely to do so again.
The votes of remaining MKs from the two parties remain unclear, although a spokesperson for Yesh Atid predicted that up to 10 out of its 23 MKs would support the measure.
The six MKs from the right-wing opposition party Yisrael Beytenu will likely support the measure.
Lapid: 'Odeh clearly crossed a line'
Lapid told The Jerusalem Post on Monday that Odeh had “clearly crossed a line,” and that if he had the votes, he would support the impeachment of far-right MKs as well, such as Otzma Yehudit chairman MK Itamar Ben-Gvir.
In an op-ed in Haaretz published on July 10, Lapid defended his decision to support the impeachment by quoting Odeh’s June comment (“Gaza won, and Gaza will win”), despite it not being part of the official grounds for impeachment.
Lapid criticized people who called him a “Kahanist” for backing the government’s initiative, saying that they were “extremists.” He cited the fact that he had formed a government with an Arab party (Ra’am), and the fact that he had appealed to the High Court to block far-right candidates from participating in elections, that he was not acting “against Arabs” as some of his critics claimed, but rather, “in defense of democracy” supporting sanctions against an MK who had crossed a line.
However, a series of politicians, NGOs, and academics appealed to Lapid to reverse his decision.
Mazen Ghnaim, Sahknin mayor and chairman of the Committee of Arab Municipal Leaders, which represents 67 local authority heads, wrote in identical letters to Lapid and Netanyahu on Sunday that the impeachment constituted a “dangerous political move that harms the democratic legitimacy of Arab citizens in Israel and undermines the foundations of proper parliamentary representation.”
“Beyond the specific harm to MK Odeh, we express genuine concern about a dangerous precedent that could in the future be used to disqualify and remove heads of local authorities, council members, and even new candidates from the Arab community – solely due to their political positions or their courageous stand alongside their constituents. This move creates an atmosphere of threat and persecution, expanding the boundaries of silencing at the expense of the democratic space,” Ghnaim wrote.
“Another serious consequence is the damage to motivation for participating in elections. A growing sense of alienation, distrust, and despair may deepen the trend of voter abstention within the Arab public – a destructive outcome for Israeli democracy as a whole,” Ghnaim wrote.
Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, an NGO whose chairman, Dr. Hassan Jabareen, represented Odeh in the two Knesset Home Committee hearings, argued on Sunday that the hearings “exposed the political nature of the campaign: rather than examining the legality of Odeh’s social media post, MKs from both coalition and opposition parties used the sessions to incite, threaten, and delegitimize Palestinian representation in the Knesset.”
It included examples from the hearings, including by committee chair MK Ofir Katz, “While the soldiers are fighting on seven fronts, the eighth front needs to be cleared, and Ayman Odeh is our eighth front,” and “you won’t be in the Knesset – we’ll stay, and you won’t. Not in the Knesset, not in Israel.”; by Likud MK Osher Shekalim, who stated, “In another country, you’d be shot by firing squad”; by Otzma Yehudit MK Yitzhak Kreuzer, who threatened Odeh that “these are your final years as a citizen of the State of Israel”; and by Likud MK Ariel Kallner, who said, “Keep shouting from prison. And we’ll destroy Gaza too.”