Research & Investigations
No Israeli bloc will seat the Arab lists it needs to win
Research & InvestigationsGraphic: Times of Palestine
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Palestinian citizens of Israel go into the 27 October Knesset election holding seats no governing coalition has said it will use, according to the polling and party arithmetic tracked through late August 2026.
The reunified Hadash-Ta'al-Balad list is polling at roughly eight seats after gaining one in the week of 24 August, per Haaretz's seat tracker; Ra'am, running separately under Mansour Abbas, sits at around five. Combined, Israel's Arab-led lists poll at roughly 11 to 13 seats out of 120 — enough, in several published scenarios, to be the difference between a governing majority and none.
The threshold each list still fears#
Balad's 2022 experience anchors the caution around every merger talk this cycle: the party split from Hadash-Ta'al at the last moment that year, ran alone, and fell under the 3.25 percent electoral threshold, leaving no seats at all for what its list would otherwise have carried.
That memory is why Hadash, Ta'al and Balad rebuilt a joint slate this year rather than risk a repeat, while Ra'am has so far held out for a seat, hoping Knesset arithmetic invites it into a coalition on its own rather than folded into a joint list.
Where the blocs stand on sitting with them#
Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid's Beyachad list and Avigdor Liberman have not ruled out relying on Arab-list abstention or support to cross a governing threshold, though neither has committed to a coalition seat for either list. Benny Gantz has kept the same posture.
Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud and Gideon Sa'ar's Golan have both ruled out governing with the Arab lists in any form. Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have gone further, campaigning explicitly against any government whose survival would depend on Arab-list votes, whether in coalition or from outside it.
What is at stake for Palestinian citizens of Israel#
The bloc arithmetic decides more than who governs. Annexation moves in the West Bank, the pace of settlement expansion, and the enforcement gap in the crime wave inside Israel's Arab towns — the Abraham Initiatives has attributed only a small fraction of killings there to closed police cases — all sit downstream of which coalition can assemble a majority without needing, or fearing, the Arab lists' seats.
Whichever bloc reaches 61 seats without them keeps the kingmaker paradox unresolved: the two million Palestinian citizens of Israel hold votes several coalitions could use, and no coalition currently says it will.
