Hadash, Balad agree to run again under Joint List, with Tibi’s Ta’al yet to sign on
Parties have been locked in fight over spots on slate with alliance projected to win 5-6 seats; Odeh says Lapid, Gantz ‘will need to sweat a lot’ to get Joint List’s recommendation
Leaders of the Hadash and Balad parties have agreed to once again join forces in the coming November 1 election under the banner of the Joint List, as they have done since 2015. Ta’al, the third party in the alliance of Arab-majority parties, has yet to sign on.
On Friday, the leaders of Hadash and Balad met at Hadash party headquarters in the northern city of Nazareth to strike the deal. The agreement puts to rest rumors of an independent Balad run that would have threatened to bury some of the parties below the 3.25 percent electoral threshold.
The Joint List — assuming it runs with all of its three parties — has been polling at some five-to-six seats. Divvying up the spots on the joint slate while keeping both parties happy had been the main sticking point in talks.
Hebrew media reports indicated that Hadash and its leader Ayman Odeh had wanted four of the slate’s top five spots for itself, but ultimately conceded the 2nd and 5th ones to Balad and leader Sami Abou Shahadeh, while Hadash will get the 1st, 3rd and 4th spots.
The parties plan to offer Ta’al a single spot in the top six if it signs on, though it was not immediately clear which one.
Odeh will continue to lead the joint slate, as he has done since 2015.
Members of Ta’al condemned the Hadash-Balad deal as a “stab in the back.” Ta’al had coveted two spots in the top six, but can now expect only one. Sources from Hadash and Balad told Haaretz that to mollify it, Ta’al will be offered a plum position like deputy Knesset speaker or faction chair.
Ta’al finds itself in a weak negotiating position, as it is highly unlikely to pass the electoral threshold if it runs alone.
The deadline for submitting election slates is this coming Thursday, September 15.
The Friday night meeting reportedly gave Hadash and Balad the opportunity to settle some of their differences around the Joint List’s platform, which has yet to be released to the public.
Following elections in Israel, all elected parties send representatives to the president to make recommendations for their preferred candidate to form a government, and the latter then awards the mandate to do so to the candidate he believes is best positioned to do so.
The Joint List has traditionally not recommended anyone, in line with its general refusal to back Zionist parties, breaking that policy only once, in 2019, when it won 15 seats and backed Blue and White’s Benny Gantz, in an attempt to thwart a Netanyahu government.
Odeh said Saturday during an on-stage interview in Tira that the alliance would condition a recommendation to the president on various promises, such as support for a resumption of diplomacy with the Palestinians, crime-fighting measures and other benefits to the Arab public.
Leaders of the anti-Netanyahu bloc including Prime Minister Yair Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz “will need to sweat a lot” to get the Joint List’s recommendation, he said.
During the most recent round of Knesset elections, on March 23, 2021, only 44.6% of eligible voters in Arab towns cast ballots, a historical nadir at the end of a decades-long slump.
Surveys by Yousef Maqladeh, who polls Arab Israelis for the Joint List as well as Ra’am, portend yet another dip in Arab voter participation in November, down to 39%, the lowest in the country’s history.
A significant dip in Arab turnout could prove to be the tipping point in the Knesset blocs and hand opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu a parliamentary majority.
Rampant abstention reflects the apathy pervading the Arab community. Many Arab Israelis have lost faith in the idea that legislative processes can deliver effective solutions to the problems plaguing their communities, among them crime, unemployment, stagnant wages and the state crackdown on irregular housing.
The Joint List is unlikely to come anywhere near matching its 2020 performance, partly due to the departure of the alliance’s fourth party Ra’am. Ra’am quit the Joint List in 2021 to run on its own, having decided to attempt to better the lives of its constituents from within government, rejecting Arab parties’ perennial outsider stance. It was ultimately incorporated into the current coalition.
Some 65% of Arab Israeli voters support the notion of Arab parties in a governing coalition, but the actual benefits from having Ra’am on the inside of the current short-lived government have remained in question: Much of the funds earmarked for developing Arab communities remain tied up in red tape. Critics add that Ra’am’s marquee legislative achievement, a bill requiring the state to link informally built homes to the electric grid, has not translated into much action on the ground so far.
Some polls have Ra’am narrowly missing the electoral threshold in the coming vote, though polls made the same predictions ahead of the 2021 election. The party remains confident it has enough support to win the required minimum of four seats.
