As parties and politicians jockey for position ahead of this year’s election, the proposed reunification of the Joint List of Arab parties is seen as a move with the potential to significantly reshape the election, boosting Arab voter turnout and strengthening the community’s representation in the Knesset.

But though the factions that would make up a potential Joint List are broadly opposed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his continued rule, by combining forces, they may end up helping the Likud leader and his right-wing allies stay in power.

The Islamist Ra’am party, communist Arab-majority Hadash, secularist Ta’al, and nationalist Balad parties signed an agreement last month to work toward running together in the next election, responding to public pressure on the factions to unite and boost their influence in national politics.

By merging into one electoral slate, the Joint List is projected to win more seats than the parties would if they ran separately, but those gains could indirectly come at the expense of other parties from the center and left that are leading the charge to unseat Netanyahu.

Sources in both Ra’am and Hadash told The Times of Israel that such concerns were real and were factoring into negotiations regarding the possibility of unifying again.

Most of the Joint List gains are forecast to come from increased voter turnout among Arabs rather than support being siphoned from other parties.

The higher turnout numbers will raise the number of votes needed for parties to cross the 3.25 percent vote-share threshold needed to enter the Knesset. While that will affect parties across the political spectrum, it is liable to disproportionately impact the anti-Netanyahu bloc, which is highly fragmented and includes a number of factions on the threshold bubble.

Because most of the parties in the anti-Netanyahu bloc have vowed not to rely on Arab politicians for support, a stronger Joint List also won’t count toward their effort to build a governing coalition of at least 61 MKs.

As a result, the Arab parties now face a dilemma between maximizing their representation in the Knesset at the expense of the opposition’s chances to unseat Netanyahu’s government, or by running separately, gaining fewer seats but increasing the likelihood of a change in government to one less likely to take an adversarial stance toward their constituents.

“On the surface, [the merger] seems good for Arab representation,” said Prof. Gideon Rahat, a senior fellow in the Israel Democracy Institute’s Political Reform Program,

Rahat noted that the parties had been pushed toward reunification by growing public anger over a crime wave that has wracked the Arab community, which has grown strikingly worse with National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir controlling the police.

Since the start of the year, 51 people in the Arab community have been killed in violent homicides, much of it tied to organized crime and clan fighting, portending an even higher murder rate for this year than 2025’s record 252 killings.

The Arab public has been highly critical of Ben Gvir, a far-right nationalist with a history of anti-Arab positions who has been accused of politicizing the police force.

“They have this huge crime and murder problem that Ben Gvir doesn’t give a damn about, and the union is based on a real need for them to come together to address this issue,” he said. “But paradoxically, it could lead to a right-wing government that ultimately benefits both Ben Gvir and Netanyahu.”

When the merger was first tried over a decade ago, it sparked a rare frisson of excitement in the Arab community, raising turnout and boosting the Joint List to 13 seats, making it the third largest party in the Knesset. Since then, the Joint List has been an on-and-off affair, with intense differences between the parties creating continual tension despite the benefits of unity.

In 2022, the last time elections were held, Balad and Ra’am each ran alone, with the former failing to cross the threshold despite receiving enough votes for three more seats, shrinking Arab representation in the Knesset.

Elections are not scheduled until October, but were they held now, successive polls, including by Zman Yisrael, The Times of Israel’s sister site, show the Joint List winning between 12 and 15 seats, compared to 10 seats they had been predicted to get if not united.

However, according to Rahat, what matters more than the number of seats is how they are used. He noted that in 2021, Naftali Bennett was able to parlay his six-seat showing for Yamina into a premiership by holding out in coalition talks and driving a hard bargain with presumptive coalition leader Yair Lapid, whose hopes of unseating Netanyahu rested on Yamina’s support.

Ra’am is largely open to joining any government; Hadash and Ta’al would likely only be open to considering supporting an anti-Netanyahu bloc, and probably only from the opposition, and Balad is opposed to supporting any Zionist-led coalition in any way.

Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas has demanded the bloc be formed as a technical alliance, which would split back into separate parties immediately following elections, to allow him the option of joining a governing coalition separately.

According to reports, Ra’am’s willingness to join a government had held up merger talks for months, as the faction’s starkly separate approach could complicate the Joint List’s ability to jointly campaign for votes.

Now, party sources say the electoral math is giving them pause.

Sources in Hadash told The Times of Israel that the parties are “weighing” how a Joint List will impact the opposition’s fortunes and the chances of unseating the current government, which they desperately seek.

One source with knowledge of the talks said that the parties would not have moved toward a merger at all due to these concerns, among others, if not for the immense pressure from the Arab public to do so.

Earlier this month, a Ra’am source speaking to The Times of Israel sister site, Zman Yisrael, expressed similar concerns that unification would harm their chances of replacing the government.

In the last two elections, the party showed considerable muscle on its own, winning six seats in 2021 and five in 2022. While it’s not clear how seats would be divied up between the Joint List parties, it’s unlikely that Ra’am would have more than five spots in the first 15 of the joint slate.

Even if it splits from the Joint List immediately after the elections to join a coalition, it would only bring a few more seats with it, which current polling shows would just barely eke above 60 seats in a best-case scenario. Ra’am officials warned that they would be reticent to throw their lot in with such a fragile majority.

“Even if a government is sworn in, that government can’t pass a budget and will fall apart after a year,” a Ra’am source said. “You can’t enter a coalition like that.”

Were the parties to run separately, though, the anti-Netanyahu bloc would be closer to forming a coalition.

Before the parties moved toward reunifying, polls showed a presumptive anti-Netanyahu bloc on the cusp of having enough support to form a coalition. With the Joint List possibly entering the picture, though, those prospects have dimmed, according to Rahat.

Polling conducted before the announcement of a potential merger among the Arab parties – including a January 22 Zman Yisrael survey published the day the parties signed an agreement to work towards a merger – showed the presumptive opposition bloc winning 56 seats, enough to get over the hump with help from six-seat Ra’am.

But a Zman poll from February 4 gave the Joint List 14 seats and put the same array of opposition parties at 54 seats, short of a majority coalition even with Ra’am.

“If you look at recent polling, without the Joint List [being formed], the opposition has roughly 57 to 61 seats, while Netanyahu has 40 to 52. If the Joint List wins 15 seats, the opposition bloc, most likely led by Bennett, won’t be able to reach 61 seats to form a government without them,” said Rahat.

He noted that Netanyahu seemed to be “enjoying” the fact that the Joint List may be reviving, and predicted that the premier would avoid attempting to drive a wedge between the Arab parties or suppress Arab turnout, as he has been accused of doing in the past.

“If my analysis is right and the Joint List is good for Netanyahu, we won’t see the right trying too hard to limit their ability to compete in elections, or commenting as he did in 2015 when he said the ‘Arabs were coming out in droves,’” he said.

Bennett, who is considered to be the strongest competitor to Netanyahu in the upcoming elections, has defended the inclusion of Ra’am in his 2021-2022 government.

But he has also said there is now no “mandate” to form a government reliant on Arab parties following the Hamas-led onslaught of October 7, 2023. Others in the presumptive bloc, including Blue and White head Benny Gantz and Yisrael Beytenu chief Avigdor Liberman, have also vetoed forming a government reliant on Arab parties.

Eager to avoid a stalemate, Bennett and others may decide to join up with Netanyahu for a unity government rather than rely on Arab parties for support. Unlike Lapid, though, Netanyahu will demand remaining in power and tell Bennett to bend the knee or take a hike, according to Rahat.

“I don’t see him agreeing to anything else,” he said.

If they don’t, Israel could be headed back to a cycle of successive elections similar to what took place from 2019 to 2021.

As the country found out during that chaotic period, Netanyahu will remain acting prime minister as long as the forces arrayed against him fall short of forming a governing coalition, even if his government has even less support.

A merger intended to grant “the Arabs more power,” Rahat warned, “will end up ruining the chance that something will change.”

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