Early last week, Joint List parliamentary faction chairman MK Ahmad Tibi declared that he and his political allies will do everything within their power to topple the right-wing government and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Against this backdrop, the Joint List is poised to serve as an indispensable cornerstone for the Israeli opposition bloc, which hinges on its political backing and the mobilization of Arab Israeli voters.
Several figures featured prominently on the faction’s slate have spent decades in the public eye, with their hardline positions and past actions widely documented. Lawmakers like Ahmad Tibi and Sami Abu Shehadeh previously faced public backlash for meeting released terrorists—Arab Israeli citizens convicted of executing lethal attacks against Israeli soldiers, civilians, and fellow Arabs who cooperated with Israeli authorities. However, the newest additions to the Joint List’s electoral slate similarly reveal a consistent pattern of glorifying convicted terrorists. Bakr Awawda, placed fifth on the faction’s Knesset list, attended public celebrations honoring the release of Karim Younis, the Arab Israeli terrorist who murdered IDF soldier Avraham Bromberg, appearing alongside other party delegates.
In another instance, Awawda published public praise commemorating Fawzi al-Nimer, an Arab Israeli terrorist who founded an underground terror cell responsible for orchestrating severe bombing attacks across Israel throughout the 1970s. Awawda wrote that he arrived to pay respects to the family of Nimer, whom he lauded as an exemplary “fighter” and “a hero of the ‘Palestinian’ people.” Nimer was directly responsible for the murder of three Israelis.
Another prominent addition to the ticket is Faten Ghattas, who joined the lineup after Jafar Farah resigned amid sexual harassment allegations. Ghattas, an ideological communist, has authored numerous articles arguing that the State of Israel is an artificial colonial invention and casting the United States as the “head of the snake” and the foremost threat facing modern humanity.
According to Ghattas’s published writings, the Jewish state was established by the British Empire solely as an imperial colonial outpost engineered to expropriate the natural resources and wealth of the Arab world. He further asserted that American Jewish capitalists financed the establishment of Israel out of an exploitative desire to amass wealth at the expense of Jewish laborers. In addition, Ghattas claimed that Israel operates the ‘Palestinian’ population as a live weapons testing laboratory driven by a motive to profit from global arms exports.
The newer faces populating the Joint List demonstrate no substantive departure from the faction’s established ideological posture: open sympathy for convicted terrorists paired with militant opposition to the State of Israel and the Zionist enterprise itself—even as leaders of the domestic political opposition actively court their backing to form a governing coalition.