He sees as anti Palestinian ?

I don't have a problem with this. That's different than refusing to attend because any jewish group might be there .

That was the objection. You don't have a problem with that?

The venue was badly chosen, and it's pretty telling that Malcolm Hoenlein from the Conference of Presidents would have refused to have the meeting in a less contentious location, if there would have been one available.

He's doing the opposite.

That's a huge office building that also houses:

UNICEF
NY Sports Clubs
NYC Office of the Governor of NY
The NY Job Development Authority
Kettering Cancer Center

Worse, Odeh supports terror vs. innocents:
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Politics-And-Diplomacy/Odeh-voices-support-for-unarmed-Palestinian-struggle-421084

And that makes him more racist than just about any Israelis you can name.

By Lisa Goldman |Published December 11, 2015

The leader of the Joint List got a rude awakening on his first official visit to the U.S. after being falsely accused of refusing to meet the leaders of a major Jewish organization in New York. ‘I have actually found that Jewish Americans are more progressive than Jewish Israelis. But the problem is with the leaders of the community. They want to tell me how to behave and what to think.’

NEW YORK — “I believe in talking to everyone,” said Joint List leader Ayman Odeh. “In the Knesset, I speak with everyone.” He added, with a half smile, “Except [Avigdor] Lieberman. But that’s only because he refuses to speak to me.”

Odeh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel whose non-Zionist party is the third largest in the Knesset with 13 seats, is currently visiting Washington and New York for a series of meetings with diplomats, Jewish community leaders, journalists, think tanks and NGOs. But so far the only meeting that has been reported by Jewish media outlets is the one that controversially did not take place — at the New York office of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations.

Upon arriving Thursday morning at the organization’s midtown Manhattan building, Odeh discovered that the umbrella group shared its office with the Jewish Agency. The Agency is affiliated with Israel’s Ministry of Absorption and with the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which is involved in initiatives to displace Palestinians from their homes in favor of Jews.

Staffers for the umbrella group suggested moving the meeting to another office on a different floor in the same building — specifically, to the offices of the Reform Jewish Movement. But Executive Vice President Malcolm Hoenlein rejected the suggestion. He then sent out a press release in which he wrote that he was “deeply disturbed and shocked at the refusal” of Odeh to meet him.

“I did not refuse to meet him,” Odeh told +972. He emphasized that he had responded to an invitation from the Conference of Presidents — that he had not requested the meeting. He did not know until he arrived that the umbrella group shared an office with the Jewish Agency.

“I just asked if we could move the meeting to another room, but they refused. Instead of saying, okay, I understand your discomfort, and offering to meet me in another office, they did everything to make me uncomfortable.” Odeh noted that he made no public statement about the aborted meeting, except in response to the statement released immediately afterward by the Conference of Presidents.

The Jewish Agency’s mandate is to promote aliyah, or Jewish immigration to Israel. The JNF has, as reported extensively by +972, been directly involved in displacing Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, as well as Palestinian citizens of Israel, in order to convert their land and homes into residences for Jewish citizens. In one particularly egregious case, the JNF has been involved in a project to reforest the “unrecognized” Bedouin village of Al Araqib in the Negev, which has been destroyed over 90 times — even as its residents, who have lived on the land for over a century, methodically rebuild each time the bulldozers depart.

Odeh, who spoke on Thursday evening at a private reception hosted by a Jewish Israeli ex-pat couple at their Upper West Side home, noted that he had by default met with more Jews than Arabs during his visit to the United States.

“I have actually found that Jewish Americans are more progressive than Jewish Israelis,” he said. “But the problem is with the leaders of the community. They want to tell me how to behave and what to think, to impose their views on me and tell me what I should say. I cannot accept that.”

Speaking in Hebrew during a conversation with +972 that took place Friday morning in Manhattan, the Joint List leader noted that he was not a member of Israel’s governing coalition. He was visiting the United States as the elected representative of Israel’s Arab citizens. Paraphrasing the statement he had given earlier in response to the press release from the Conference of Presidents, Odeh underlined that his party also refrained from involvement in ministries that pursued mandates favoring Jewish citizens at the expense of the state’s Arab citizens — specifically the Ministry of Defense, the Foreign Ministry, and the Ministry of Aliyah and Immigrant Absorption.

Odeh spoke passionately about his vision for the state of Israel as a place where all citizens, Arabs and Jews, had equal rights in every sphere. He understands that many Jews feel threatened by the idea of seeing their state become a place not defined by its Jewishness but as a state of all its citizens.

“I absolutely acknowledge the Jewish right to self determination!” he said vehemently. “But I am also committed to achieving complete equality for all citizens, regardless of religion or creed.”

The quasi-governmental Jewish Agency boasts about having contributed to the building of over one thousand residential communities for Jews in the State of Israel. But no Israeli government since 1948 has allotted land for a single new town or village for its Arab citizens, who comprise 20 percent of Israel’s population, even as the government imposes severe restrictions on the acquisition of building permits in Arab-majority areas. As a result, Israel’s Arab “villages” are actually densely populated towns and small cities that lack the basic amenities and infrastructure taken for granted in Jewish towns the same size or even smaller.

Odeh asked rhetorically, “What’s the problem with building new villages where our old villages were in 1948? All I see is concrete where our villages were. We’ve lost the naiveté of village culture, but we haven’t replaced it with cosmopolitan urban life — with cafes and places of culture. I just want someone to convince me that this will hurt the Jews. It is actually in the best interest of the Jewish citizens for us to live in a state of equality.”

“I am sorry,” he continued, “if this sounds naïve. But I love both peoples. I am expressing my very frank and honest desire to build a joint and equal society. And unfortunately that desire threatens the hegemony.”

In response to a question regarding his vision of Israel in 10 years, Odeh described a “democratic state with full equality for all, social justice, an economy not controlled by tycoons, a bilingual population speaking Hebrew and Arabic and a more responsible attitude to environmental issues.”

Toward the end of the interview, Odeh suddenly recited from memory “I Believe,” a famous poem composed at the end of the nineteenth century by the great Hebrew poet Shaul Tchernichovsky. He emphasized one stanza in particular:

Laugh for I believe in friendship/That a spirit I’ll find, a kindred heart/To share my hopes and share my joys/Compassion ever willing to impart.

“Listen to those words!” he said. “Amazing.”

“So if I know Hebrew poetry and appreciate Jewish history and understand their pain and the Shoah, then I want them to understand our history and our narrative and pain.”

Source: http://972mag.com/ayman-odeh-has-a-dream-but-not-all-american-jews-like-it/114671/

and yet I'm so thoroughly not surprised.

The Jewish American establishment clearly cannot handle an Arab non-Zionist with the chutzpah to assert his right to be treated respectfully and equally in his own country.

Ayman Odeh’s decision to visit the United States and meet with Jewish community leaders cannot have been an easy one. The burden of scrutiny has been heavy indeed, from all sides. His own constituents, the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, were ambivalent at best about what many perceived as a mission that would either be co-opted to soften the perception of Israel’s policies toward its Arab citizens, or twisted to undermine both Odeh and the credibility of his party’s platform.

With Jewish community leaders so firmly supportive of the Netanyahu government, and the United States so committed to its unbreakable alliance with Israel that it had not undertaken a single step to end the occupation in over two decades, many worried that Odeh’s bridge building mission would be misinterpreted as asking for favors.

To a certain extent, these concerns were borne out by events on December 10, when Odeh backed out of a meeting with the Conference of Presidents, a major Jewish NGO umbrella group, because the chairman insisted on holding the meeting in the same office as the Jewish Agency. This is the same Jewish Agency that has been directly involved in hundreds of initiatives to establish new residential communities for Jewish Israelis on land that was expropriated from Palestinians.

Rather than show some sensitivity to Odeh’s point of view, the president of the Conference of Presidents, Malcolm Hoenlein, refused not only to hold the meeting in another room but also immediately released a statement in which he accused Odeh of canceling the meeting.

Later, Hoenlein told the Forward that he saw no reason to “succumb” to Odeh’s request that the meeting be moved to another room (even though it was Hoenlein who had asked for the meeting and Odeh was his guest). Hoenlein also told the Forward, “It’s outrageous that a member of Knesset would say that I can’t go into a place because it has Zionist associations.” Hoenlein added: “He doesn’t have a problem taking [his Knesset] paycheck.”

Hoenlein’s response is, to be kind, monumentally inappropriate. Not to mention: arrogant and entitled beyond belief. Hoenlein is a Jewish citizen of the United States who is the unelected head of an NGO that espouses political opinions far to the right of those held by the majority of Jewish Americans. Yet he believes that he has the right to comment on whether or not a citizen of the state of Israel, a man who heads the third largest party in the Knesset, who was elected by democratic vote to sit in his country’s legislature, should receive a salary.

The Knesset is not a “Zionist institution.” It is the legislature of the state of Israel. A political party need not espouse Zionist ideology in order to be eligible to sit in the Knesset. The ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism is not, for example, a Zionist party. It is headed by a Ger Hasid; and the Ger, along with several other Hasidic groups, are ideologically opposed to Zionism. I would love to see Hoenlein refuse to move the location of a meeting with a Hasidic group because they didn’t want to sit in a Jewish Agency office.

The point for Hoenlein and for Rick Jacobs, the Reform rabbi who also released a “shocked-and-appalled” statement about Odeh’s “refusal” to sit in the Jewish Agency office, is, obviously, that Ayman Odeh is an Arab non Zionist. Worse, he is an Arab non Zionist who has the chutzpah to assert his right to be treated respectfully and as a fully equal citizen of the state in which he was born.

The reaction of these Jewish community leaders is disgraceful. It is rather reminiscent of the master of the big house who tells the serf to wipe his feet and take off his hat if he wants to visit — making sure he enters via the tradesmen’s entrance.

It’s so commonplace to hear Israeli and Jewish “leaders” bemoan the absence of moderate Palestinian leaders. And here we have this man who reaches out his hand and speaks passionately to Jewish audiences about building a shared society of economic and social equality for Arabs and Jews. Who quotes Hebrew poetry and emphasizes his knowledge of the Jewish narrative.

If Ayman Odeh were an African American politician running for U.S. Congress, American Jews would be out campaigning for him and his liberal, inclusive values. But instead of embracing Odeh, Jewish leaders here try to undermine him with the suggestion that he rejects the existence of the state in which he lives as a tax-paying citizen — and they do not.

Source: http://972mag.com/redefining-chutzpah-the-monumentally-inappropriate-treatment-of-ayman-odeh/114771/

Yet he believes that he has the right to comment on whether or not a citizen of the state of Israel, a man who heads the third largest party in the Knesset, who was elected by democratic vote to sit in his country’s legislature, should receive a salary.

He didn't' question whether he should receive a salary at all. Complete bullshit. He said the same guy who wont sit in a room because it has Zionist cooties has no problem receiving a salary from the Zionists....a true statement.

LIE in the article YOU posted?

the Knesset is not a Zionist institution is so ridiculous, I simply cannot take it seriously. That goes for this guy and the Hassidic morons.

The leader of the 'Joint List'....Odeh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel whose non-Zionist party is the third largest in the Knesset with 13 seats

to continue to focus on the petty nonsense? While you pretend the Knesset - the government of Israel - is not a Zionist entity? That's like saying the US Congress is not an American entity. This has become pointless - I'm done.