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WHAT THE JOINT LIST’S REVIVAL SIGNIFIES FOR PALESTINIAN POLITICS IN
ISRAEL  
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Abed Abou Shhadeh
January 28, 2026
+972 Magazine
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_ Beyond electoral arithmetic, the reunification of Arab parties is a
step toward rebuilding political infrastructure and combating social
fragmentation. _

Palestinian citizens of Israel, including Hadash party head Ayman
Odeh, hold a mass demonstration against the epidemic of criminal
violence and state neglect, Sakhnin, northern Israel, January 22,
2026, photo: Michael Giladi/Flash90

 

For Palestinians inside Israel, last week proved to be a collective
breaking point. It began when Ali Zbeedat, the owner of a grocery
store chain in the northern city of Sakhnin, shut down his businesses
last Monday to protest an extortion attempt by criminal gangs. Over
the following days, Zbeedat’s defiant act sparked coordinated
strikes across dozens of Arab localities, where residents are
similarly fed up with their abandonment by the state in the face of an
epidemic of organized crime. 

The escalation culminated in a mass demonstration in Sakhnin last
Thursday, with an estimated 50,000 people taking to the streets in
what was the largest mobilization of Palestinian citizens in years. 

This sequence of events generated exceptional political momentum. Just
hours after the demonstration, amid sustained public pressure, the
leaders of Israel’s four major Arab-led parties — Hadash, Balad,
Ta’al, and Ra’am — met with the heads of local authorities and
signed a brief, symbolic document bearing the logo of the Sakhnin
Municipality. In it, they expressed their intention to revive the
Joint List ahead of this year’s election, the historic electoral
alliance
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formed 10 years ago that aimed to overcome the ideological divides and
interpersonal rivalries among the community’s fragmented leadership,
but broke down in 2022.

This is a historic event in a volatile political moment. Even before
the publication of polls [[link removed]]
gauging the Joint List’s electoral strength — predicting that it
could secure 15-16 of the Knesset’s 120 seats, making it the third
largest force in Israeli politics — the popular demand for unity
suggests the possibility for unprecedented voter turnout in Arab
society. 

Israeli news outlets described the renewal of the Joint List as
“drama in the political system,”
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Such a scenario would alter the balance between opposing blocs and
force Zionist parties across the spectrum — from Yair Golan’s
center-left Democrats to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud
— to recalibrate their strategies
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As expected, the images of Arab party leaders standing hand-in-hand
triggered a wave of incitement from right-wing politicians and talking
heads. When the election comes around, Netanyahu will no doubt rally
his base by reviving the racist rhetoric he used in the 2015 campaign,
warning
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that “the Arabs are coming out to the polls in droves.”

Yet the return of the Joint List should not be understood exclusively
through the prism of electoral arithmetic. Today, Israel’s
Palestinian citizens increasingly find themselves isolated, caught
between criminal organizations and the messianic right. As such, the
announcement should be seen as part of a broader campaign to rebuild
Palestinian political infrastructure and organizing potential, as the
only antidote to deepening social disintegration and state
persecution.

FULL-SCALE STATE DISINTEGRATION

On the day that tens of thousands of Arab demonstrators filled the
streets of Sakhnin, two news stories offered a revealing snapshot of
where Israel’s state institutions — and above all, the police —
are heading.

One concerned the prolonged delay
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in the investigation into Social Equality and Women’s Empowerment
Minister May Golan, a Likud MK, despite substantial evidence
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of corruption. The other was the report that Meir Suissa
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a police officer who was found guilty of throwing stun grenades at
protesters opposing the judicial overhaul in 2023, had his conviction
overturned; Ben Gvir had denounced the original ruling, and has since
sought to promote Suissa to the rank of chief superintendent.

Recent months have witnessed countless similar developments. The
simultaneity of crises and wars makes it difficult for the public to
register the depths of the changes unfolding at the highest levels of
power. Netanyahu’s government has effectively succeeded in capturing
state institutions
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through political appointments, direct intervention by ministers, and
systematic intimidation of senior officials. 

From Likud to Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit, the ruling parties have
worked consistently to embed loyalists within these institutions and
across government ministries — Justice, Transportation, Education
— as well as within the army and the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal
security service. The open displays of affection between police
officers and Ben Gvir, be it applause, hugs, or public gestures
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police conferences, are part of a trend that preceded his appointment
as minister, but has only grown since.

During the tenure of former police commissioner Kobi Shabtai, and
especially since Ben Gvir entered the government, there has been a
wave of early retirements
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including of experienced superintendents and police chiefs who had
developed institutional expertise over a number of years. These
departures were perceived by the public as marginal, but their
significance was great.

It is true, of course, that the police never excelled in addressing
crime within Palestinian communities in Israel, and they have long
suppressed our freedoms. Yet there was at least a residual commitment
to procedural norms and administrative standards; now, that minimal
framework has disappeared.

Earlier this month, using the pretext of a stolen horse, police turned
the Bedouin village of Tarabin Al-Sana
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war zone, and ultimately killed a father of six in front of his
family. This, too, was an expression of institutional weakness: a
police force unable to solve crime, and therefore increasingly reliant
on excessive force and collective punishment — practices familiar
from the decades of occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.

The deaths of two ultra-Orthodox Jewish infants
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in a daycare center last week offered yet more evidence of the
breakdown of a functioning state. The incident should have shaken the
country; instead, the story disappeared from the public eye within two
days. 

But perhaps the surge of murder cases in Arab society is the clearest
indicator of the state’s unraveling. And into this vacuum enters the
Israeli messianic right. 

[Palestinian citizens of Israel hold a mass demonstration against the
epidemic of criminal violence and state neglect, Sakhnin, northern
Israel, January 22, 2026. (Michael Giladi/Flash90)]
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Palestinian citizens of Israel hold a mass demonstration against the
epidemic of criminal violence and state neglect, Sakhnin, northern
Israel, January 22, 2026. (Michael Giladi/Flash90)
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Palestinian citizens of Israel hold a mass demonstration against the
epidemic of criminal violence and state neglect, Sakhnin, northern
Israel, January 22, 2026. (Michael Giladi/Flash90)
In a recent video [[link removed]]
posted to his social media, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich argued
that the response to organized crime in Arab communities in Israel is
to expand Jewish settlement, drawing direct parallels to the West
Bank. “In the Negev, the Bedouins are trying to rule, go crazy,
collect protection … delinquency, crime, and illegal weapons,” he
warned. “We understand that the key to security is settlement. Like
in Judea and Samaria, today the government established five new Jewish
settlements in the Negev which join six others. That’s how we’re
restoring security to the residents of the Negev.”

Smotrich’s 2017 “Decisive Plan”
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blueprint for “ending” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by forcing
Palestinians to give up their national aspirations or emigrate abroad
— increasingly appears to be shaping our reality, its logic is no
longer confined to the West Bank and Gaza but now also directed
inward. It marks another step toward a consolidated regime of
apartheid.

BUILDING POWER FROM BELOW

It is against this backdrop that calls to revive the Joint List became
overwhelming. Originally formed in 2015, it was a reaction to both the
raising of the electoral threshold (a move intended deliberately to
threaten the survival of smaller parties) and growing public pressure
among Palestinians in Israel for political unity. The Joint List
brought together forces that had long stood apart, including
communists, nationalists, and Islamists.

That experiment proved fragile. The list fractured in 2019, during the
first of five election cycles held between 2019 and 2022. Although it
was reconstituted in the subsequent two elections and peaked at an
unprecedented 15 Knesset seats, the momentum stalled when Ra’am
split off in the fourth and fifth rounds, leading to a prolonged
crisis within Arab political leadership. 

Against this history of fragmentation and the current grim political
circumstances, the reunification of the Joint List gestures toward a
latent potential in Palestinian society inside Israel.

[Palestinian citizens of Israel hold a mass demonstration against the
epidemic of criminal violence and state neglect, Sakhnin, northern
Israel, January 22, 2026. (Michael Giladi/Flash90)]
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Palestinian citizens of Israel hold a mass demonstration against the
epidemic of criminal violence and state neglect, Sakhnin, northern
Israel, January 22, 2026. (Michael Giladi/Flash90)
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Palestinian citizens of Israel hold a mass demonstration against the
epidemic of criminal violence and state neglect, Sakhnin, northern
Israel, January 22, 2026. (Michael Giladi/Flash90)
Even if Netanyahu’s current coalition loses power and is replaced by
another, reversing the decline towards fascism will be difficult. The
structural changes — including the systematic weakening of
Israel’s judiciary and the status of the legal advisor
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been implemented too deeply. 

Yet if Palestinians in Israel succeed in organizing politically and
socially, they may be better equipped to cope with the harsh
consequences of institutional collapse and the deliberate production
of chaos in their streets as a tool to control them
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And in the wake of the historic demonstration in Sakhnin, there is
hope that Arab society will find ways to bridge internal disputes and
build broad coalitions, including partnerships with left-wing Jewish
organizations and activists.

Such alliances could begin at the most basic levels of social life —
from parents’ committees and neighborhood groups to workers’
organizations, doctors, lawyers, and business owners.

Importantly, models of this kind already exist within the Palestinian
civic sphere in Israel. They range from popular committees in Arab
towns to Orthodox associations that have served Christian communities
since the 1920s. In Jaffa, for example, the Islamic Council,
established in 1988, operates on a principle of broad community
participation: Residents elect representatives who work across social,
political, and educational arenas. These initiatives foster forms of
civic engagement that do not depend on state institutions.

A Joint List reconstituted from the bottom up, anchored in
community-building and new forms of political organization, could draw
many more people into politics. It might also offer a model for
Israeli society as a whole, which itself is undergoing a parallel
process of social fragmentation. The list’s reunification presents
us with a historic opportunity to translate symbolic unity into
material transformation — and it cannot be missed.

_A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local
Call. Read it __here_
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_Abed Abou Shhadeh is a political activist from Jaffa. He served as a
city council representative of the Palestinian community in Jaffa-Tel
Aviv from 2018 to 2024, and currently hosts the Al-Midan
(الميدان) podcast at Arab48._

_+972 Magazine_ [[link removed]]_ is an independent,
online, nonprofit magazine run by a group of Palestinian and Israeli
journalists. Founded in 2010, our mission is to provide in-depth
reporting, analysis, and opinions from the ground in Israel-Palestine.
The name of the site is derived from the telephone country code that
can be used to dial throughout Israel-Palestine._

_Our core values are a commitment to equity, justice, and freedom of
information. We believe in accurate and fair journalism that
spotlights the people and communities working to oppose occupation and
apartheid, and that showcases perspectives often overlooked or
marginalized in mainstream narratives._

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