Joint List and Ra’am MKs in the Knesset, L to R: Mtanes Shehadeh, Ayman Odeh, Ahmad Tibi, and Mansour Abbas, Aug. 1, 2019. (credit: Zaher333, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Is Israel’s Jewish sector racist for opposing a coalition government with Arab parties Ra’am and The Joint List, or are there legitimate reasons for rejecting a partnership with these parties?
In Israel’s 2026 elections, Likud won 27 seats and Yashar 21, each leading the Netanyahu bloc and the Zionist opposition bloc, respectively. As of Nov. 5, 2026, both still fall short of the 61-seat majority. However, if the Zionist opposition would include the Arab parties—who won a historic 19 seats combined—that bloc would exceed the 61-seat threshold.
According to an Israel Democracy Institute poll, 75 percent of Israeli Jews oppose the Joint List joining the government or serving as a safety net, while about two-thirds oppose Ra’am doing the same. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, alongside opposition leaders Avigdor Liberman and Naftali Bennett, pledged not to form coalitions with Arab parties. Gadi Eisenkot conditioned any coalition on these parties recognizing Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, accepting national service, and agreeing to eliminate Hamas in Gaza.
The sole Zionist party that supports Arab parties joining their coalition are the Democrats, led by Yair Golan. His party is part of the bloc that seeks to topple Netanyahu from power.
CNN, The New York Times, the Washington Post, and NBC have prominently quoted Arab party members, Golan, or a political scientist calling opposition to coalitions with Arab parties racist. Yet their descriptions of the parties tend to be brief and inadequate.
In an explainer on the Arab-led parties, the Times described the Joint List’s Hadash as a “leftist Arab-Jewish faction” whose name stands for the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality; Balad as a “Palestinian nationalist party”; and Ta’al as an “Arab party” whose name means the “Arab Movement for Change.” It called Ra’am a “socially conservative Islamist party” founded by a branch of the Islamic Movement that “works to strengthen Muslim identity and empower the country’s Arab minority.” The Post likewise called Hadash leftist and Arab-Jewish and Balad Palestinian nationalist but described Ta’al as centrist. CNN labeled Hadash communist, Ta’al secularist, Balad nationalist, and Ra’am Islamist.
Those labels, however, tell readers little about the positions and conduct that have shaped Israeli objections to a coalition.
An Oct. 30, 2026 broadcast by Israel’s public broadcaster Kann highlighted this debate. Media personality and Ra’am voter Yaron London argued Israel cannot democratically exclude its 20 percent Arab population from power, noting Ra’am’s leader explicitly recognizes Israel and supports national service, while pointing out the hypocrisy of funding Haredi leaders who evade service. Conversely, Amihai Attali argued that while Arab citizens deserve equal rights, parties like Ra’am, rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood and or those rejecting Israel as a Jewish state, pose an unacceptable security risk.
So where do the various Arab parties stand?
The Joint List
On paper Balad, Hadash, Ta’al and Ra’am all support establishing a Palestinian state. The Joint List, composed of Ta’al, Hadash and Balad, specifically advocates for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and transforming Israel into a “state of all its citizens” rather than a Jewish state, a position heavily pushed by Balad, which also supports a Palestinian “right of return.”
The Joint List is led by Yousef Jabareen (Hadash) and Ahmed Tibi (Ta’al). Balad chair Sami Abu Shahadeh withdrew from the third spot shortly before the election due to disqualification proceedings after Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara cited his Oct. 8, 2023 article calling the Hamas attack “an important historic event.”
Under Israel’s Basic Law on the Knesset, a candidate or party may be barred from an election for rejecting Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state, inciting racism or supporting armed struggle against Israel by an enemy state or terrorist organization.
While the Central Elections Committee has previously disqualified Balad and Ra’am-Ta’al, the Supreme Court has consistently overturned these decisions (candidate lists have not been successfully barred since Kach and Kahane Chai in 1992). Consequently, the law has not prevented politicians from advocating for terrorists, a clear indicator of a robust democracy that undermines accusations of racism or apartheid.
For example, in 2020, Jabareen, Tibi, and other Joint List MKs visited hunger-striking detainee Maher al-Akhras, whom the Shin Bet and Hamas-affiliated media identified as a Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) leader, prompting the PIJ to threaten Israel if he died in custody. In 2017, Jabareen (represented by pro-BDS NGO Adalah) petitioned to visit convicted murderer and Fatah terrorist Marwan Barghouti, whom Tibi has also visited.
This is not the only instance of Joint List members appearing in support for hunger-striking terrorists. Such strikes are often used as a tool by Palestinian prisoners as a tactic against Israel to secure their release or improve their prison conditions. In February 2013, Tibi advocated for the release of Samer Issawi (convicted of attempted murder) and Ayman Sharawna (a Hamas terrorist convicted of a bombing that injured 18 civilians). Both had been released in the 2011 Shalit exchange but were rearrested for violating release terms; according to the IDF, Sharawna now oversees terror recruitment from Turkey.
Furthermore, both Tibi and Jabareen publicly supported PIJ leaders Khadar Adnan and Muhammad Allan during their respective hunger strikes.
Leader of the PLO, Yasser Arafat, Oct. 8,1996. (credit: Gideon Markowiz / Photographer: Israel Press and Photo Agency (I.P.P.A.) / Dan Hadani collection, National Library of Israel / CC BY 4.0, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Tibi was PLO chair Yasser Arafat’s adviser from 1993 to 1999. As the Palestinian signatory to the Oslo Accords and PA president from 1994 to 2004, Arafat publicly denounced terrorist attacks while simultaneously releasing convicted terrorists from jails and appointing some of them to senior positions within his cabinet and Gaza intelligence services. U.S. lawmakers, in 1997, faulted Yasser Arafat for refusing to combat terrorist activity in PA administered territory, arguing that Arafat’s failure is the greatest threat to achieving lasting peace in the Middle East.
Ra’am
For the 2026 elections, Ra’am under Mansour Abbas has emphasized improving conditions for Arab citizens—including tackling crime and securing government resources—and has sought a role in governing rather than remaining in opposition. Abbas has also said Israel “was born as a Jewish state” and “will remain that way,” a different position from the Joint List’s call for a “state of all its citizens.”
Ra’am previously joined the Bennett-Lapid coalition in 2021, and in April 2021, Netanyahu courted Abbas and asked the Ra’am party to join or support a Likud-led coalition government.
Notably, Yoav Segalovitz ran on the party’s second electoral slate. He is a former police commander, former deputy minister of national security, and former Yesh Atid MK.
In December 2025, Ra’am head Abbas announced he would cut ties with the Shura Council, a body affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement, which has guided the party and made its decisions. In an interview on the decision, Abbas told Channel 12 that “Ra’am is moving in the direction of becoming a completely civil [non-religious] party.” However, as recently as 2024, Israel’s Justice Ministry found two non-profits affiliated with Abbas’s party to have “transferred funds or cooperated with organizations outside of Israel that were declared as terrorist organizations.”
A Bank Leumi attorney told Kan that there had been “money transfers here to associations that we know are Hamas associations” after the bank blocked one of the two nonprofits’ accounts.
Although Abbas has condemned “every act of terror and all the crimes that took place on October 7” he has also repeatedly declined to publicly call Hamas a terrorist organization. In early October 2026, a member of his party, Yasser Hujirat, was asked if Hamas was a terrorist organization. He responded, “This organization—part of which is essentially a charitable organization—also has a component that seeks to gain the right to exist and the right to be recognized as a state.”
Ultimately, Israeli citizens have a right to decide on the extent to which their country is Jewish, and what ideological red lines they have for their government. That debate is not simply about whether Arab parties should hold power. None of this proves that prejudice plays no part in Israeli politics. It does mean that describing opposition to these parties as racism, without explaining the objections, leaves readers with a distorted picture of the debate.