Hadash-Ta’al chair, MK Ayman Odeh, calls on MK Mansour Abbas’ Islamist party Ra’am to join a united list of Hadash and Arab parties, after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to threaten to outlaw it on the grounds that it is connected to the Muslim Brotherhood.

“Join a joint list! United, we will command 17 mandates and remove Netanyahu,” Odeh says, speaking before a faction meeting at the Knesset, Monday, November 24.

MK Ayman Odeh attending Hadash–Ta’al faction meeting at the Knesset (Photo: Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

While recent polls indicate Ra’am would win 5 seats and Hadash-Ta’al 6, a single unified Jewish-Arab Hadash front and Arab parties list is expected to perform better than the parties on their own.  Ra’am, on its own, was part of the coalition that briefly unseated far-right Netanyahu in 2021, the first time in decades that an Arab party had joined the government. Ra’am, which joined the coalition led by prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid in 2021, takes a conciliatory stance toward Israeli racist establishment than its parent movement’s more radical sister branch, the Northern Islamic Movement, which was outlawed in 2015.

Odeh accuses Netanyahu of “incitement” against Ra’am and the entire Arab-Palestinian population in Israel and sharply criticizes opposition leaders for cooperating in the de-legitimization of Arab citizens. He notes that Hadash “stands alongside Ra’am” despite “serious political and ideological disagreements,” and calls on all opposition parties to “do everything” to prevent Netanyahu, and far-right ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, from being re-elected.

According to today’s Haaretz editorial, “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is hard at work on preparing for the next election and his aim is clear: To neutralize any possibility for political change, to prevent any repeat of the historic precedent set by the “change government,” in which for the first time since the establishment of the state, an Arab party – Ra’am, headed by Mansour Abbas – was a full member of a coalition.”