Arab parties win 19 seats in Israeli election, potential kingmakers

Ra'am and the Joint List won a combined 19 seats in Israel's 2026 election, making them potential kingmakers as neither major bloc can form a coalition without them.

Boaz Golani, a senior research fellow at the Ne'eman Institute and professor emeritus at the Technion, argues that the 19 seats of the Arab parties change the political equation and create a coalitional deadlock. According to him, Ra'am and the Joint List do not accept Israel's definition as the nation-state of the Jewish people and advocate the idea of a "state of all its citizens," which distances them from the Jewish majority. He notes that Ra'am chairman Mansour Abbas condemned the October 7 massacre but refrained from defining Hamas as a terrorist organization. The solution he proposes is a constitutional anchoring of the state's identity based on the Declaration of Independence, which would replace the Nation-State Law and require every party to accept the fundamental principles. The article emphasizes that Israeli Arabs deserve representation, but full political partnership requires recognition of the national framework.