“This is no longer a question of an alliance between three parties with no real connection between them and no ideological glue binding them. This is a scandal within the home, within the party.” This is how a veteran activist of Hadash from the town of Umm Al-Fahm described how his party blocked an official condemnation by the Joint List party (an alliance of parties that includes Hadash) of the chemical weapons attack by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime forces.

Hadash, a successor to the defunct Israeli communist party, is the largest component of the Joint List, created ahead of the 2015 general elections — a union that made it the third largest faction in the Knesset when it garnered 13 of its 120 seats.

Much has already been said and written about the ideological differences among the parties comprising the list, which were forced to band together or risk disappearing from the Israeli political map after a 2014 decision to raise the electoral threshold (which would have required each to get four seats in order to get into the Knesset). But this latest disagreement, which has become the talk of the Israeli-Arab street, focuses on the particular position of Hadash regarding the war crimes committed by Assad’s forces against residents of the town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province.

The bloody Syrian civil war has already offered spectators all sorts of terrible sights; nevertheless, no one in Israel could remain indifferent to the pictures of civilians — children, women, men — suffering and dying after being sprayed with lethal sarin nerve gas thrown at their town by Syrian army airplanes. On April 9, Israel’s diplomacy and defense Cabinet met to consider offering medical treatment to children affected by the chemicals, in addition to the treatment provided regularly to Syrians injured in fighting in areas close to the Israeli border. On the same day, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin toured the Ziv Hospital in the northern town of Safed where injured Syrians are hospitalized. At the same time, Israelis set up a fund to provide immediate medical help to Syrian children, and within eight days they managed to collect most of the targeted amount – 300,000 Israeli shekels ($82,000).