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 of allegiance at 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, 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 into a 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 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.
In a recent video 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” — a 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.
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 to the government — have 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. 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.
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.
