Arab Joint List says will offer outside support for coalition without Netanyahu

(Oct. 12, 2026 / JNS)

Yousef Jabareen, chairman of the Joint List, said on Saturday that the alliance of Arab parties is prepared to provide parliamentary support to a government replacing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even without joining the coalition.

The announcement comes ahead of Israel’s Oct. 27 election.

“We’re not giving anyone a blank check,” Jabareen said, insisting that any support would require negotiations over the Arab community’s demands. He called for measures to combat crime in Arab communities and said his party would not support budgets for war or Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.

Another demand is a “genuine political horizon,” he said, without explicitly mentioning the Palestinian issue, according to Israeli broadcaster Channel 12.

Jabareen argued that no “alternative government,” that is one not led by Netanyahu, could be formed without negotiating with the Joint List.

Naftali Bennett (B’Yahad party) and Avigdor Liberman (Yisrael Beiteinu) have issued statements rejecting the formation of a government dependent on Arab parties, while Gadi Eisenkot (Yashar party) has set conditions for parties that want to join his coalition.

Netanyahu in response took to X to say that Jabareen “confesses” that his bloc will form a government with Eisenkot.

“Eisenkot has no government without the Arab parties, [The Democrats Party chairman] Yair Golan, Liberman and Bennett,” Netanyahu wrote in Hebrew.

The Joint List is composed of Arab parties Balad and Ta’al, and Hadash, a communist and predominantly Arab party.

On Sept. 23, the Central Elections Committee decided to disqualify the entire slate of the Joint List from running to the Knesset, including the Balad list in particular, on the grounds of Section 7A of Basic Law: The Knesset, which forbids political parties from expressing views that oppose the Jewish and democratic nature of the State of Israel. The decision was approved in a vote of 18 against five.

However, the decision was overturned on Oct. 3 by Israel’s Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice.

The court in an expanded panel of nine justices unanimously accepted the petition by the Joint List, saying that the criteria for applying Section 7A of Basic Law: The Knesset are narrowly construed and limited to extreme cases.

The court also dropped proceedings concerning Balad Chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh after he announced that he was withdrawing his candidacy for the Knesset. His announcement came after the justices appeared to indicate that they would uphold the Central Elections Committee’s disqualification of him.

The committee voted 30-4 on Sept. 23 to disqualify Abu Shehadeh, accepting petitions arguing that he supported armed struggle against Israel and denied Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state.

The case centered on an Arabic-language article Abu Shehadeh published on Oct. 8, 2023, one day after Hamas-led terrorists invaded Israel. In the article, he described the attack as “an important historic event militarily, politically and strategically,” and wrote that others could learn from Hamas’s ability to surprise Israel.