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........

© The Times of Israel