Joint List blasts ‘rotten and racist’ Likud bid to bar Arab parties from election

By Ariela Karmel

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14 September 2026, 10:25 am

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Ariela Karmel is a political correspondent at The Times of Israel. She previously reported for Calcalist and Haaretz. She holds an MA in Middle Eastern and African History from Tel Aviv University and a BA in Political Science from the University of British Columbia.

The Joint List accuses Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party of racism and attempting to silence Arab political representation after the party said yesterday it would file a request with the Central Elections Committee (CEC) to ban the Arab-majority slate as well as Mansour Abbas’s Arab-majority Ra’am from the October 27 election.

“The disqualification request by the crime family known as ‘Likud’ is yet another rotten and racist move by a party that has completely lost the public’s trust and brought us nothing but destruction and death,” the Joint List, an alliance of the three Arab-majority parties Hadash, Ta’al and Balad, says in a statement. Ra’am has not publicly responded to Likud’s announcement.

“Netanyahu knows he is on his way to losing the election, and therefore will stop at nothing to prevent that moment,” the slate charges, vowing that “no campaign of incitement and no fascist attempt to disqualify us will stop us on the path to bringing down the Netanyahu-Ben Gvir-Smotrich government.”

Polls indicate that neither Netanyahu’s bloc nor the Zionist opposition parties led by Gadi Eisenkot’s centrist Yashar are on course for a clear Knesset majority.

Without defections from Netanyahu’s bloc, the anti-Netanyahu parties will likely need the support of at least one Arab-majority party to form a government, making Ra’am in particular a potentially decisive player.

Similar efforts to bar Arab parties and candidates from elections have repeatedly been overturned by the High Court of Justice, most recently in 2022, when the court unanimously overturned the Central Elections Committee’s decision to disqualify Balad.