A Joint List for a Joint Future: How this party rose in the polls and can they cling to success

When journalists talk about getting to watch history unfold before their eyes, I know this is what they mean. I won’t ever forget the night I was at Joint List headquarters in the Arab town of Shfaram, in Israel’s north. Early exit polls were showing there would be two victors in the race - one of them is the prime minister and the other was standing right in front of and, well, all around me.

 The party made unprecedented gains - 15 seats. Unprecedented. Now that I've been covering this party for a year, let's look at how they went from being a featured party, trying to appeal to a minority that historically shows pretty low voter turnout, to boosting Arab voter turnout and branding themselves as a new progressive left-wing party for all Israelis - Arabs and Jews alike.

The Joint List is a combination of four mostly Arab parties and actually they don’t agree on much - on one end of the party you have the Islamist faction whose memebers have said and done several things over the years that are viewed as very controversial by the general Jewish Israeli public. On the other side you have the secular Hadash party which finds its roots in the communist movement and at the top of its ticket does and has traditionally featured a blend of both Jews and Arabs. 

These parties came together in 2015 when Netnayahu raised the threshold for parties entering the government, so they were forced to consolidate but certainly not agree on all issues. 

The party’s leader, Ayman Odeh, recently chose to take the party in a direction that was seen as controversial, even by Joint List leaders - he threw support behind Gantz, not due to “love for Mordecai”, as he said referring to the Purim story, but due to “hate of Haman.” He wanted to unseat Netanyahu or “Abu Yair” as he is called by many in the Joint List. 

Odeh even wrote an Op-Ed about it in the New York Times where he quoted scripture and said “the stone that the builders rejected became a cornerstone,” as he pledged to “end Netanyahu’s grip on Israel.”

If you look at their progress over the course of the year, efforts by the Joint List managed to boost Arab voter turnout by about 15 percent. Perhaps their biggest victory was that they managed to attract so many Jewish voters - in several Jewish towns support for the Joint List actually doubled, which is partially due to the fact that there was a poorly planned and executed merger of left-leaning parties but also because the Joint List shifted gears with the slogan “A Joint List for Joint Future” - branding themselves as all that’s left on the left. 

I asked one of the party leaders Aida Touma-Sliman about that in the interview below. Just look at the excitement of the crowd behind me - they are buzzing.

Celebrations are in order for the Joint List, certainly, but if you look at data produced by the Abraham Initiatives, which you can see in the report below, and data from TAU and other institutions, as well as many Arab voters that I’ve spoken to - their top issue is the violence and crime that disproportionately plagues their communities. After that they are concerned with building rights and after that, education. Much of this data also shows there would be overwhelming support for an Arab party that would be willing to join a coalition - something Odeh has toyed with in the past but still won’t commit to. Those 15 seats may be big seats to fill. 

Now that the Joint List, with Odeh at the helm, has not succeeded in unseating Netanyahu as he tried to do, he has to make good on moving an agenda forward that will cater to these issues or he might find himself back where he started a year ago- with less public confidence and less voters. The stone that the builders rejected hasn’t become the cornerstone just yet but now, more than ever, it’s a possibility.