Israel's Arab parties announce joint list amid higher electoral threshold

Israel's Arab political parties announced on Friday that they have formed a joint list, ahead of the March 17 national elections.

The move was prompted by a recent law, which raised the electoral threshold for the Knesset (parliament).

The movement, called "Joint Democratic List," includes members of the Arab parties that have been already serving in the Knesset. The parties include the joint Arab-Jewish communist party Hadash and three Arab parties: Balad, Ta'al and the United Arab List.

This is the first time in the history of the state of Israel that the Arab parties join forces.

The recently voted chair of Hadash Aiman Ouda will head the list. It will also include Dov Hanin, an outspoken Jewish parliament member from the party, and Haneen Zoabi will be the first woman from Balad.

The agreement was signed on Thursday night, after weeks of negotiations over the makeup of the list.

Ramez Jarissi, former mayor of the city of Nazareth who coordinated the negotiations, presented the list at a press conference held at the town on Friday.

"This list has representation for the entire social fabric of Israel, it is truly a democratic list and is the only democratic list in the Israeli Knesset," Jarissi said.

"We call upon the Arab world and the Palestinian Authority to learn how we managed to unite between communists, nationalists and Islamists in one list. This is the first time this has happened in the Middle East," he added.

Head of the movement Aiman Ouda said at the press conference that he expects the list to get 15 seats (out of a total of 120) in the upcoming elections, adding the list would act to dethrole the ruling 'far-right'.

MK Ahmed Tibi (Ta'al) said that the credit for the joint list should go to Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman (from the nationalist Israel Beytenu), whose bill from last year raised the electoral threshold.

"Lieberman and the far right politicians raised the electoral threshold to push Arabs out of the Knesset," Tibi said. "Today we're closer to the top, and he's closer to the electoral threshold."

Other than propsing the controversial governability law, responsible for the elevated threshold, Lieberman had repeatedly spoken against the Arab parties and their members, which he claimed seeked to "destruct Israel."

Last week, the Supreme Court rejected appeals against the government law, which raised the electoral threshold from 2 to 3.25 percent of the votes. Seats in the 120-member Knesset are apportioned nationally, according to the percent of the total votes each party gets.

Lieberman charged that the governability law would help stabilize governance in Israel amid the frequent election cycles in the past decade.

The Adalah Legal Center, advocating for the rights of Israeli Arabs, was one of the petitioners against the bill. It said in a position paper last year. It claimed that the move would make it harder for Arabs, who constitute 20 percent of Israel's population, to have representation in the Knesset.

"The change will put pressure on Arab political parties to merge, to increase their chances, but this pressure will blur the important ideological differences between them, leaving Arab voters with few alternatives," the paper charged.

Despite that, according to a recent survey conducted by the Abraham Fund Initiative, advocating for Jewish-Arab co-existence, and the Jaffa Institute, a non-profit social agency, found that a joint list would raise the turnout among the Arab voters by 10 percent, to a total of 68 percent of the eligible Arab population. Endit