Ra’am and Joint List | The surge of the other — SkimNews
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- Israel recorded 77.7% voter turnout on October 27 — its highest since 1999 — in the first election held since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack.
- Arab citizens, roughly 20% of the population, turned out at nearly 80% by Channel 12 exit polls, the highest in at least a decade; Israeli Democracy Institute polls found a party's stance on crime in Arab society among the most important voting factors, while experts cited fear as the prime motivation.
- Joint List and Ra'am secured a combined 19 of the Knesset's 120 seats — their highest-ever tally and the third bloc after the election.
- Benjamin Netanyahu called the Arab turnout a matter of 'life and death' on polling day after his campaign's 'either the right or Palestine' billboards, accused the Arab parties of 'stealing' the election and vowed to keep them out of government.
- Gadi Eisenkot has been reluctant to join the Arab parties even as their 19 seats make them kingmakers in a hung parliament where no bloc has a clear majority, and neither side has shown willingness to govern with them; both parties also faced pre-poll attempts at disqualification.
- Mansour Abbas's Ra'am became the first Arab party in nearly 44 years to enter a government when it backed the Bennett-Lapid cabinet in 2021; that coalition collapsed within a year, and Ra'am returned to opposition after Netanyahu's bloc won in 2022.
- Joint List commits to ending the occupation, establishing a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders and lifting the siege on Gaza, while Ra'am backs a state with Jerusalem as its capital and prioritises practical resources for Arab towns — a split inside the new third bloc.
Why it matters: With 19 of 120 seats and no bloc holding a majority, Arab parties now sit in the decisive position of kingmakers — the same leverage Ra'am exercised in 2021, when the Bennett-Lapid government it backed collapsed within a year. Netanyahu's vow to keep them out of power means that leverage stops short of a seat at the cabinet table.
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