The Arab parties Ra’am, Hadash, Ta’al, and Balad are negotiating to reestablish the Joint List bloc ahead of the next elections. “The atmosphere [during their meeting on Sunday] was really good,” MK Aida Touma-Sliman (Hadash-Ta’al) told The Jerusalem Post.
Hadash-Ta’al presented a “road map toward the Joint List” to the leaders of Ra’am and Balad, he said. The plan included a detailed three-phase process “that must be completed in the process of reestablishing the list,” he added.
The united bloc began to break apart ahead of the 2021 elections after Ra’am broke away. In a dramatic last-minute split in 2022, Balad left the two remaining factions and ran on a separate list.
Currently, the two Arab Israeli parties in the Knesset are Ra’am (United Arab List) and Hadash-Ta’al. Hadash and Ta’al ran together in the 2022 election.
The three main points of the road map presented by Hadash-Ta’al were: agreeing on the objectives the Joint List aims to achieve; formulating the character of the list and agreeing on a political program that will serve the objectives; and setting a timetable and mechanisms for reestablishing and managing the list, while learning from past experiences.
Ra’am and Balad had received the proposal positively and were now reviewing it before proceeding with negotiations, Touma-Sliman told the Post.
There were two main reasons for reestablishing the Joint List, she said.
On the one hand, it is important that the Joint List is in power to bring an end to the ongoing war in Israel, “stopping the genocide, and trying to reach peace,” Touma-Sliman said.
Arab parties have shared goal to prent right-wing gov't from being in power
On the other hand, the Arab parties have a shared aim to do all that is possible in preventing a right-wing government from being in power, “like the one we have now,” she said.
“Being in a Joint List is not going to make all of us suddenly agree or erase all the differences among us,” she added. “On the contrary, we will respect each other’s differences, but we believe that there is almost no real big issue or difference in ideas between the different parties, especially when the dangers are so great.”
When asked whether the new Joint List bloc would be willing to join a non-right-wing coalition in the next government, Touma-Sliman said such thinking was “going very much ahead of time,” since the current goal is to bring the parties together. “We need to wait until the end of the election and see what comes up, and then that will be discussed, and we’ll go from there.”
Asked what would make this Joint List bloc different from the previous one, Touma-Sliman said in the past, there were no set mechanisms among the parties to settle their differences.
“I think that issues need to be discussed and decided about,” she said. “This is part of learning lessons from the past.”
Another aspect that would be different from the past Joint List is that the four factions within the bloc would not be allowed to engage in negotiations “with other parties individually,” Touma-Sliman said.
“If there will be any kind of negotiations with any of the other parliamentary groups, it would be the Joint List as a group together and not giving anybody a chance to separate between us,” she said.
Regarding the Israel-Hamas War, Touma-Sliman said she hoped a hostage-ceasefire deal would be reached.
“A war is going on, a bloody war, when a genocide is happening,” she said. “We think that there should be a political agreement to end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and this we all agree on.”