For young Israeli Arabs, strong party means strong integration

The Joint List’s success in the 2020 election was entirely unprecedented. The two Arab parties that competed in the April 2019 election (Hadash-Ta’al and Ra’am-Balad) won 10 seats, while the Joint List (composed of four essentially Arab parties: Hadash, Ta’al, Ra’am and Balad) won 13 seats in September 2019. Now the Joint List has 15 seats. Similarly, there was a noticeable rise in the percentage of eligible voters in Arab and Druze villages, who actually went out to vote. Their number increased from 49% in April to 59% in September to 65% now.

Two of the most prominent characteristics of this success are the desire, which many young Arabs have, to integrate into Israeli society, resulting in more Arabs voting, and a real increase in the number of Jews, who voted for the Joint List. According to the party’s own data, some 20,000 Jews voted for it. This amounts to about half a seat.