“When the party lists for Knesset elections were finalized last Thursday, they contained one surprising result. The three predominantly Arab parties that had run together as the Joint List in three of the previous four elections—Hadash, Ta’al, and Balad—were no longer united, with Hadash and Ta’al choosing to run together and Balad splintering off to run on its own. This echoed the move that Ra’am, the Arab Islamist party headed by Mansour Abbas, made before the fourth election in breaking away from the Joint List and running independently, and means that Israel’s fifth election in three and a half years will have three separate Arab factions running for Knesset. This, more than any other development, has the potential to alter the balance of power between the blocs led by Prime Minister Yair Lapid and former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, and may also point to the direction in which Israeli Arab politics is moving.”

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