Joint List MK Dr. Faten Ghattas, who holds the third spot on the Arab faction’s parliamentary slate, demanded on Sunday that Israel change its national anthem, Hatikvah, and reconsider its statutory status under Israeli law. “We have always called for changing the national anthem—legislation on the matter can certainly be reconsidered,” Ghattas stated in an interview with Makan, Israel’s public Arabic-language television channel. The official standing of Hatikvah is anchored in two separate pieces of Israeli legislation: the Flag, Emblem, and National Anthem Law, which was amended in November 2004 to codify the anthem for the first time formally, and the 2018 Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, which establishes at the Basic Law level that “the national anthem of the State is Hatikvah.”
Ghattas’s remarks come less than a week after lawmakers from the Joint List demonstratively walked out of the Knesset plenum during the singing of Hatikvah at the swearing-in ceremony of the 26th Knesset. As Channel 14 revealed on Wednesday, representatives of all three parties that make up the Joint List participated in Fatah’s general conference in May, where they stood respectfully during the playing of the ‘Palestinian’ anthem and sat in the same row as Zakaria Zubeidi, the former commander of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades terrorist organization in Jenin. Following that report, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shared the Channel 14 exposé on his X account and wrote: “A dangerous government must not be formed with the terror supporters of Ra’am and the Joint List!”
Ghattas’s demand also arrives at the height of ongoing coalition negotiations. President Isaac Herzog tasked Yashar Chairman Gadi Eisenkot—who received the Joint List’s recommendation—with forming a government, after Eisenkot’s party canceled initial talks with Likud following Netanyahu’s swearing-in speech. On Thursday, Netanyahu and Eisenkot met for a security and diplomatic briefing. In a video statement distributed afterward, the prime minister said the proper response to lawmakers who deliberately walked out during the singing of Hatikvah is to establish a national unity government, which he dubbed a “government of hope.”
Ghattas, a member of the Hadash party, was selected by the party’s council in September to replace Jafar Farah on the slate, and was placed in the third slot after Balad Chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh withdrew from the race. As Channel 14 has previously reported, Ghattas is an ideological communist who has published numerous articles over the years asserting that Israel is a colonial enterprise established by the British to seize control of the Arab world’s resources—writings in which he also referred to the United States as the “head of the snake.”