Three of the four major Arab parties – Hadash, Ta’al, and Balad – will move ahead with reestablishing the Joint List without the Ra’am Party, led by MK Mansour Abbas, marking a setback in efforts to reunite all major Arab parties under a single electoral slate.
Hadash announced the three parties’ plans on Wednesday, after months during which there had been no official progress on the formation of the Joint List. Negotiations between the four main Arab parties began openly last summer.
The party noted that the “door was still open for Ra’am to join” ahead of the elections, which are scheduled to take place no later than October 27. Polls have shown that if the Arab parties were to run together, they would receive more seats than they would obtain in a separate run.
There had been disagreements in the negotiations with Ra’am on Sunday and Tuesday when the factions discussed their stance, a Hadash party representative told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday.
Hadash subsequently released a statement that the three parties could no longer wait for Ra’am to join, and that they would progress without Abbas.
Ra'am welcome to join Joint List once disagreements solved
“The establishment of a broad Joint List that includes all components is still the best option for increasing voter turnout and replacing the [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu government. However, our responsibility to the public requires us to move forward and not remain in a state of waiting and uncertainty,” the party stated.
“Therefore, we will work to establish the broadest possible Joint List, while leaving the door open for Ra’am to join the process at any time,” Hadash added.
Without Ra’am, the three parties stated that they accepted the framework for a technical electoral arrangement, noting that this was done despite political reservations and “out of commitment to unity within the Arab public and to increasing its political strength.”
Hadash added that despite the efforts and flexibility shown by Hadash, Ta’al, and Balad throughout the process, a final agreement with Ra’am was not yet reached.
The party also said that even if the Arab parties run on two separate lists, with Ra’am as its own independent party, the sides would still work toward surplus vote agreements and “maintain a substantive and respectful political dialogue, out of a shared commitment to increasing voter turnout and replacing the current government.”
The last major development for the alliance was in January, when all four Arab party leaders, including Abbas, signed a commitment to work toward reestablishing the Joint List bloc ahead of the next elections.
The signing came after tens of thousands of protesters marched in a mass demonstration through the northern city of Sakhnin, rallying against police failure to curb organized crime in Israel’s Arab sector.
The Arab party leaders who joined the protest were called on by the public after the demonstration to unite and make an agreement.
A Hadash-Ta’al Party spokesperson told the Post at the time that public pressure was one of the factors that contributed to the signing, while also noting that more than 80% of the public would want a Joint List.
Since the agreement was signed, Abbas has said he would form an alliance with the other Arab parties as a purely technical bloc, which could split up in the Knesset after the elections. There have been numerous reports of disagreements between the parties throughout the months.
The Joint List has changed multiple times since its original state
The bloc, originally made up of the four parties, began to break apart ahead of the 2021 elections after Ra’am left the alliance. Then, in a dramatic last-minute split in 2022, Balad broke off from the two remaining factions and filed a separate list.
Currently, the two Arab-Israeli parties in the Knesset are Ra’am and Hadash-Ta’al – the latter a reduced Joint List that agreed to run together in the 2022 election.
The Balad Party, not in the Knesset, continues to fail to pass the electoral threshold in polls.
In past elections, the Arab parties had the greatest outcomes when running together, with a peak in success in the 2020 elections when the joint list received 15 seats.
In 2021, the Ra’am Party joined the coalition during the Naftali Bennett-Yair Lapid government, marking the first time an Arab party was a formal member of a governing coalition.
Though Ra’am seeks to be part of the coalition again, most opposition parties in the bloc seeking to replace Netanyahu have rejected the possibility of forming a government with any of the Arab parties.
It is still unclear how the opposition bloc will secure enough seats to form a government without the support of the Arab parties and the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties.