Can a renewed Joint List survive until Israel’s elections?
Joint List MKs celebrate after a Knesset vote rejected an extension of the Palestinian family reunification law, in Jerusalem, July 6, 2021.
Samah Salaime writes in +972 on 14 April 2026:
Let’s start with the good news: despite reports of disagreements, all four of Israel’s Arab parties — Hadash, Balad, Ra’am, and Ta’al — want to revive the Joint List and renew their alliance in the upcoming Israeli elections, scheduled to be held this October. On April 3, representatives of the four parties met to advance the framework their leaders had sketched out at the beginning of this year in Sakhnin, following a mass demonstration of Palestinian citizens against the state’s failure to curb rampant organized crime in their communities.
These developments have offered us Palestinians in Israel a rare sense of relief. It has seemed possible that the familiar status quo of political fragmentation, seen in the alliance’s temporary 2019 split and the more decisive break-up in 2022, might give way to something durable by the time polling for the elections begins in earnest.
Within Palestinian society, a supermajority supports the reestablishment of a Joint List. The desire for unity is so strong that no politician in the Arab community today is willing to be responsible for the alliance’s failure. That reluctance, borne partly of guilt and partly of fear of public criticism, is an encouraging sign and has become a powerful political force in its own right.
Segments of Israel’s Jewish public are also following these developments with cautious optimism. Yet to muster a defiant opposition to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, they are counting on their Arab neighbors to “rescue Israeli democracy” from the ultranationalist right.
Now, the bad news: their ideological orientations of the four Arab parties, ranging from secular Palestinian nationalism and socialism to Islamist and accommodationist approaches, leave them divided on the terms of a revived Joint List. The dispute is less about the allocation of Knesset seats than about electoral strategy and, crucially, whether to join an anti-Netanyahu coalition government. And that may prove far more difficult to resolve.