The kingmakers who could determine Israel’s election

In the run-up to Israel’s high-stakes election, few parties have featured more often in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attacks on rivals than Ra’am and the Joint List.

Together, the two parties representing the Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up about 20 percent of the population, are projected to win 13 seats. If this is confirmed at the October 27 polls, the Arab-led lists could be critical to any post-election coalition, regardless of its political stripe.

They have been here before.

In 2021, Ra’am made history by becoming the first Arab party to enter an Israeli government after joining a broad coalition that briefly removed Netanyahu from power. Netanyahu had previously shown himself ready to negotiate terms for a potential government with Mansour Abbas, the leader of Ra’am, or the United Arab List. But instead, Abbas joined forces with the coalition of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid to try to drive through some of the measures he had campaigned for.

This time, both the Netanyahu camp and most leaders of the self-styled Zionist opposition bloc have ruled out forming a government with the parties representing Palestinian citizens. Still, Netanyahu and his allies have sought to portray their political opponents as beholden to the Arab-led lists, while the opposition has been attacking them for their reliance on the minority ultra-Orthodox parties to maintain their own power base.

Opinion polls have consistently indicated that Netanyahu’s Likud party and the far-right coalition it leads are running neck-and-neck with the Zionist opposition bloc, with neither side on track to win an outright majority in the 120-strong Knesset.

“Netanyahu would work with Ra’am in a heartbeat, if it meant staying in power,” said Yossi Mekelberg, a Middle East analyst at Chatham House.

“The opposition, too, don’t seem to understand the consequences of their actions,” he said of repeated attempts across the opposition bloc to undermine the credibility of what may be a future plank in any government.

“If it came down to it, of course they’d accept the support of the party they’d previously vilified without thinking of how that will undermine their government, and undermine the votes of the large numbers of Arab Israelis who support them,” added Mekelberg.

In the lead-up to the polls, Likud has repeatedly used hard-hitting attack adverts to warn that if Netanyahu is voted out, it will be the Arab parties that would emerge as kingmakers in a new government potentially led by former army chief Gadi Eisenkot, the leader of the Yashar party.

“There is no Gadi without [Ahmad] Tibi,” said a Likud campaign slogan in reference to the leader of Ta’al, one of three parties comprising the Joint List.

The alliance, which also includes the Hadash and Balad factions, has said it could provide a so-called safety net to the anti-Netanyahu coalition by agreeing not to stand against it in a confidence vote, even if the alliance does not join the government. In return, it has said it would demand certain conditions, including a path to Palestinian statehood and fighting organised crime.

Combatting the wave of violent crime that has been allowed to engulf Palestinian communities, as well as addressing discriminatory government policies, including on housing, have also been the focus of Ra’am ahead of the election.

Established in 1996, the party has already distanced itself from its religiously conservative foundations. In December 2025, Abbas said the party’s political decision-making body would separate from its religious council. Eight months later, it selected its electoral list independently for the first time and placed the Jewish Zionist Yoav Segalovitz, a former senior police commander and deputy public security minister in the Bennett-Lapid government, second on its slate.

Describing Ra’am as “one of the most interesting parties” of this year’s election, Mekelberg said: “Through Mansour Abbas, they are continually reinventing themselves without appearing opportunist.”

The upcoming election is the first since the Hamas-led attack in southern Israel of October 7, 2023 that led to the killing of an estimated 1,200 people, and triggered Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

The war has also sped up a political shift to the right, with Arab-led parties increasingly targeted by right-wing figures seeking to cast them as complicit in the October 7 assault.

In May, Bennett apologised for going into government with Ra’am, while in September, Netanyahu’s Likud and the Otzma Yehudi party of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir petitioned to bar Ra’am and the Joint List from the election.

On September 23, the Central Elections Committee, whose members are drawn from the Knesset’s parties, voted to disqualify both lists, as well as two individual candidates.

Balad leader Sami Abu Shehadeh was to be barred over an article he wrote on October 8, 2023 describing the Hamas-led attack of the previous day as an “important historic event”. Ofer Cassif, a Jewish politician with Hadash, was targeted in a petition filed by Likud that cited legal prohibitions on candidates who support “an armed struggle by an enemy state or terrorist organisation against the State of Israel”.

On October 2, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the disqualifications of the Joint List and Ra’am, as well as Cassif’s, by a 7-2 majority. Abu Shehadeh had withdrawn his candidacy a day earlier, after it became clear the court was likely to uphold his disqualification.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Cassif later called it “a political decision far more than a judicial one”, driven by “fear that they’re going to need us”.

Orly Noy, a Balad candidate and the first Jewish politician to be voted onto the party list’s top five, said it was “safe to say” that the alliance is not going to be part of the next ruling coalition.

“It depends if the other parties want to prioritise the wishes of their voters or their own racism. However, even if we’re excluded, we can still gain concessions from any coalition in return for our support,” she added. “That might not mean ending the occupation, which of course would be ideal, but there’s a lot we can still do that will make people’s lives better.”

Fallout

The taint of October 7 has not only extended to Arab parties unconnected to the events of that day, but also to ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties.

As routine partners in Likud’s governing coalitions, they have faced accusations by many leading opponents of draft-dodging, while drawing heavily on what many regard as a generous state welfare package.

Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community is largely represented by two parties: Shas, which draws on Jews of Spanish, North African and Middle Eastern descent; and United Torah Judaism (UTJ), comprising Jews of central and eastern European descent. Each is polling at about seven or eight seats.

Rather than focusing on foreign policy and taxation, their core aims tend to be shielding ultra-Orthodox students from military service, securing welfare support for the large families common in the community, where many men study rather than work, and protecting state funding for their schools and institutions.

Long seen as Netanyahu’s most dependable allies, they broke with Likud last year over its failure to legislate an exemption to the draft. The UTJ left the coalition altogether, while Shas quit the government but did not pull its 11 politicians out of the parliamentary coalition. Shas later gave up its coalition committee roles, and both parties boycotted coalition bills.

Nevertheless, the support of the ultra-Orthodox has come with a political price tag. In January, opposition leader Yair Lapid accused the government of sending billions “to the corrupt and [the] draft dodgers” while another possible contender for the premiership, the right-wing Avigdor Lieberman, who heads the Yisrael Beytenu list, likened Shas and UTJ to the Taliban over their lack of female representation.