Senior officials of Arab parties in Israel have told Al-Monitor that the Joint List will be revived to run a single Arab list in the Sept. 17 elections for the 22nd Knesset. According to various assessments, the parties will within two weeks resolve the disputes that had led to the party disbanding in January. The effort to reunify was expected, which was why lawmakers from Hadash, Ta’al, Balad and Ra’am voted last month in favor of dissolving the 21st Knesset after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form a new government.
The political center-left, mainly the Blue and White, had hoped that at the least Hadash and Ta’al, which aspire to Jewish-Arab political cooperation, would have voted against Netanyahu’s proposal to disband the Knesset. In that case, Netanyahu would have had to return the mandate for forming a government to President Reuven Rivlin, who might have then asked Netanyahu's rival and Blue and White Chair Benny Gantz to try his hand at it. True, the four Arab parties would probably not have provided the majority needed to prevent the Knesset from dissolving even if they had voted against it, but they could have created a semblance of commitment to Jewish-Arab political unity against the political right. The latter, obviously, did not happen.
