Israel’s election last week left the country no closer to forming a government, despite three voting rounds in the past year. But one major development is the growing strength of the “Joint List” bloc of majority-Arab parties, which is poised to play an important role in determining what Israel’s next government looks like.
As the third-largest party with 15 seats, the Joint List effectively prevents a right-wing coalition from returning to power, while also becoming a necessary component in any potential center-left coalition government.
But there’s a catch. No Israeli government has ever included Arab parties, and efforts over the past few days to build a center-left coalition that could unseat Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have fallen apart over the unwillingness of some Jewish politicians to sit in a government with, or even backed by, Arab parties.
Israel is voting — for the third time in a year. That’s polarizing voters even more.
As such, the increasing electoral power of the Arab minority is forcing the political establishment to choose between unending gridlock — or a government more inclusive of the country’s Arab citizens, who are 20 percent of the population.
With a fourth election on the horizon, will Israel’s center-left break this long-standing taboo?
How did the Joint List evolve?
The Joint List was formed in 2015 by four Arab-majority parties long separated by ideological differences. Ahead of that year’s election, right-wing politicians passed a law raising the electoral threshold to enter Israel’s parliament, apparently hoping to undercut the Arab parties. But the four parties managed to overcome their differences and unite, invigorating their public in the process and gaining a record 13 seats in the Knesset.
In April 2019, the Joint List faced a setback after splitting into two camps amid personal infighting and petty politics. Angry and dispirited with their leadership, Arab citizens recorded their lowest turnout in history, which nearly kept either camp from crossing the electoral threshold. By September’s redo election, however, the List had reunited and again claimed 13 seats.
Will Israel’s Palestinian Arab citizens turn out to vote?
Unity alone, however, could only sustain the bloc for so long. Sensing the Arab public had grown tired of feckless, outsider politics, Joint List leader Aymen Odeh endorsed the leading opposition party, Blue and White, in its bid to form a government and offered the Joint List as a possible coalition partner. It was a controversial maneuver and ultimately unsuccessful, but it demonstrated to his constituency a proactive desire to be more than a bystander on the national stage.
Moreover, Odeh started to rebrand the Joint List as the new vanguard of the Israeli left, filling a void created by traditional parties such as Labor and Meretz as they chased an Israeli voting public that has shifted considerably to the right.
Leveraging the Arab parties’ long-standing campaign to transform Israel into “a state for all its citizens,” rather than an exclusively Jewish state, Odeh has portrayed Arab citizens as central stakeholders and defenders of Israel’s shrinking liberalism — as well as a leading voice for democratic values, human and civil rights, and the struggle to end Israel’s 52-year occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Since September, Odeh has pushed for greater Arab-Jewish cooperation to balance against the strength of right-wing parties like Likud. His party launched an all-out campaign to rally voters, and appeal beyond the confines of its ethnic voting base.
On March 2, the Joint List benefited from this foresight with the highest voter turnout in years. Around 88 percent of Arab voters went for the Joint List, taking crucial ballots away from Blue and White and other parties.
Arab parties have been on the periphery of Israeli politics
Given their traditional place at the periphery of Israeli politics, staking out a leadership claim to the left has seemed out of place. In truth, however, while a position of direct influence would be new, the Arab minority has always been indispensable to the Israeli left and to larger political dynamics.
Repeat elections in Israel may not be enough to overcome religious divisions
Before the formation of Arab-majority parties that began with Hadash in 1977, Arab politicians had run on lists associated with the main Zionist parties. This helped the Labor movement dominate Israeli politics for nearly 30 years. By 1984, however, no Arab lists with Zionist parties remained.
Since 1977, the leftist parties have only returned to power twice. In 1993, Yitzhak Rabin’s government nearly collapsed while pursuing the Oslo accords with the Palestinians, but was able to remain in power when two Arab parties agreed to endorse his fragile coalition without actually entering the government. The second time was in 1999, when Ehud Barak was voted into office during one of only two direct elections for the premiership, again allowing a Labor leader to take advantage of Arab votes.
Israeli Arab politics has limits — and potential
Arab citizens in Israel historically have failed to maximize their electoral potential, a result of internal fragmentation and substantial antagonism from the state and Jewish majority. The formation of the Joint List in 2015 was a major step forward in increasing the power of Arab politics. If not influential directly, a united Arab front at least had the ability to sap other parties of valuable seats in the Knesset.
So far, the center-left parties have remained unwilling to bring the Joint List into the fold. Blue and White leader Benny Gantz promised voters he would not enter into a political arrangement with Arab parties. When Gantz began to backslide on that commitment in the days following the election, coalition members torpedoed his efforts — two members of Blue and White objected, and Gesher party head Orly Levy refused to sit in a government backed by Arab parties.
At the same time, another Joint List member, Ahmad Tibi, is working with Blue and White’s Ofer Shelah to craft legislation to prevent an indicted prime minister (like Netanyahu) from forming a government. Participating in the drafting of a law of such weighty consequence could be a sign of a middle ground, in which Arabs are taken seriously at the national level, but not fully included in governing.
But that does little to solve Israel’s current inability to form a governing coalition. While mainstream parties may eventually find a way forward, in the short term it’s clear that Israel’s political map is changing. To avoid future paralysis, mainstream parties will find it difficult to ignore the country’s Arab citizens.
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Omar H. Rahman is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, where he is writing a book on Palestinian fragmentation in the post-Oslo era.