Hadash-Ta’al party leader MK Ayman Odeh called on all Arab parties to unite ahead of the next elections, during statements on Tuesday at the annual Givat Haviva Conference for a Shared Society.
“I call on all Arab parties: Let us unite, all of us. Let us bring 17 mandates,” he said.
Odeh added that the unity of the parties would be the “decisive factor” that removes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from his position in the next elections, currently scheduled for October 2026.
He said joining forces would also prevent the right-wing ministers, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, “from continuing.”
“We must do everything, absolutely everything, to remove Netanyahu,” Odeh emphasized.
“The central struggle is over Israeli democracy as a whole, for all citizens, Jews and Arabs alike. This cannot be a sectoral struggle, but rather a struggle to build a true democracy,” he added.
The return of the Joint List
The leaders of the four central Arab parties, Ra’am, Hadash, Ta’al, and Balad, began negotiations in August to reestablish the Joint List bloc ahead of the next elections.
The bloc, once made up of the four Arab 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-Israel 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.
In 2021, Ra’am 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.
On Monday, Netanyahu slammed Bennett and the opposition during a Knesset debate, claiming that the opposition wants to be part of the Muslim Brotherhood.
President Isaac Herzog spoke at the Conference for a Shared Society as well on Sunday, which was attended by members of Knesset, and called for unity between Jews and Arabs, specifically after the war.
“Arab citizens of Israel are an integral part of Israeli society, and the State of Israel, and they are entitled, plainly, as a matter of right and not charity, to equality in the fullest sense of the word,” Herzog said.
He added, “The lack of equality in Israel is a driver not only of the national challenge I spoke about, but also of a missed opportunity on a historic scale. Arab society may be the resource with the greatest potential, and at the same time the most underutilized, of the State of Israel.”