The Arab-majority Hadash party is set to hold internal primaries on Saturday to select its first new leader in over a decade, in a vote expected to bring fresh energy to the faction’s ranks and help invigorate efforts to reunify the country’s four main Arab parties under a single ticket as elections inch closer.

Two of Hadash’s three sitting MKs, including party chairman Ayman Odeh, are stepping down, opening the door to new leadership at a moment when Arab parties are under great public pressure to unite for the upcoming vote. The outcome of the primaries is likely to influence both the prospects of reestablishing the Joint List of Arab parties and the approach such a unified Arab bloc could take toward supporting Zionist parties currently in the opposition in their bid to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right, ultra-Orthodox coalition.

In a statement announcing the primaries, Hadash described the upcoming elections, currently scheduled for late October, as a “decisive struggle against the Netanyahu-Ben Gvir-Smotrich government and against the deepening of the occupation, abandonment, racism and fascism.”

Saturday’s vote, in which senior party members will choose the top six candidates for the Hadash slate, will mark the first party primaries of the 2026 campaign season; only a handful of Israeli parties, including Netanyahu’s Likud and Yair Golan’s The Democrats, use primaries to select their Knesset slates.

It comes as lawmakers from both the opposition and coalition appear poised to dissolve the Knesset and bring the election forward by as much as two months.

Candidates for the Hadash slate had until Thursday to submit their names for the vote among the party’s 966-member National Council, who will cast ballots Saturday in the Arab town of Deir Hanna in the Lower Galilee.

Odeh, who has led the party since 2015, announced in May 2023 that he would remain in office through the end of the current Knesset term but would not seek reelection. He led the Joint List when it first came together in 2015, bringing new political energy to the Arab public, but struggled to hold the alliance’s four parties together in later years.

Former MK Yousef Jabareen, who served in the Knesset from 2015 to 2021, when Hadash was part of the Joint List, is widely viewed as the frontrunner to replace him.

He faces former Nof Hagalil deputy mayor Dr. Shukry Awouda for the top spot, but party sources told The Times of Israel on Wednesday that there is “a clear consensus that Jabareen will lead the party.”

Jabareen, a legal scholar and longtime Hadash activist, hails from the Arab city of Umm al-Fahm in the so-called Triangle region just south of the Lower Galilee, a densely populated cluster of Arab towns and villages that has increasingly pushed for greater representation within the party.

His expected rise to leadership would mark a geographic and political shift for the left-wing party, which for years has been dominated by figures from the north and coastal urban centers like Tel Aviv and Haifa, the latter of which is also home to outgoing chairman Odeh.

Activists from the Triangle region have in recent years argued that the area, home to about 250,000 of Israel’s approximately 2 million Arabs and heavily affected by the violent crime epidemic plaguing Arab society, has not been sufficiently represented in the party’s leadership.........

© The Times of Israel