For a decade, the idea of Jews and Arabs standing together in Israel has lived mostly in the street, in protest lines, in ceasefire vigils, in the quiet work of activists shielding aid convoys or standing between settlers and Palestinian villagers. The question now being asked, as Israel prepares for a general election on 27 October 2026, is whether that idea can survive the harder arithmetic of the ballot box. A new party believes it can, and whether it is right may tell us a great deal about the state of Israeli politics after nearly three years of war. Will it help to defeat Netanyahu, or will it simply waste votes in the coming critical Israeli elections?
The party is called Makom Lekulanu, “A Place for Us All”, and it was launched in June 2026 in Nazareth, the largest Arab city in Israel. The choice of venue was itself a statement, as most parties unveil themselves in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, but this one chose to begin where the community it hopes to mobilise actually lives. It emerged from Standing Together, the grassroots Jewish-Arab movement founded in 2015 that became one of the most visible anti-war voices in the country following the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023. The movement’s membership swelled during the war years, and the party is, in effect, its attempt to translate moral presence into parliamentary seats.
It helps to know a little about how these elections work. Israel chooses its 120-seat parliament, the Knesset, by proportional representation, which means parties win seats roughly in line with their share of the national vote, and no single party ever wins enough to govern on its own. Governments are coalitions, put together through hard bargaining once the votes are counted. Israelis have been back to the polls again and again in recent years, so the ritual is a familiar one. About a fifth of the country’s citizens are Arab, the Palestinians who remained inside Israel’s borders after the war of 1948 and the generations born since, and they vote in these elections like everyone else. That sets them apart from the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, who live under a different arrangement, hold no Israeli citizenship, and have no say in who governs from Jerusalem. It is largely these Arab citizens of Israel that Makom Lekulanu hopes to reach.
Who They Are
What distinguishes Makom Lekulanu is the deliberate symmetry of its leadership. It is co-chaired by Rula Daood, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who becomes the first Palestinian woman to lead a national political party in the country, and Alon-Lee Green, a Jewish Israeli and co-founder of Standing Together. The slate they head is split evenly between Arab and Jewish candidates, and evenly between women and men, a structure intended to embody, rather than merely promise, the equality the party talks about.
Among the candidates is Yonatan Zeigen, whose mother, the veteran peace activist Vivian Silver, was killed by Hamas in her home at Kibbutz Be’eri on 7 October. That a man who lost his mother in the attack should run on a platform of Jewish-Arab partnership and diplomacy is, for the party’s supporters, the most eloquent argument it has. It refuses the logic that bereavement must harden into permanent enmity. Others on the list include Sally Abed, a Palestinian member of Haifa city council, the peace and women’s rights activist Ghadir Hani, and Itamar Avneri, a Tel Aviv-Jaffa councilor.
The platform mixes the diplomatic and the domestic, calling for an end to the war and a negotiated path toward an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, but it also speaks to the daily concerns of the communities it courts: the epidemic of violent crime devastating Arab towns, the cost of living, housing, and wages. Its first stated priority is the restoration of personal security in Arab communities, a reminder that for many Palestinian citizens of Israel, the most immediate threat is not the distant conflict but the gunfire on their own streets. The message is presented in both Hebrew and Arabic, a small but pointed departure from the way most Israeli parties campaign.
The Case for Hope
The party’s founders make an argument that is, at its core, about turnout rather than theft. Their contention is that a great many potential voters, young Palestinian citizens above all, and Arab women who have historically stayed home, do not vote because no party has felt genuinely theirs. Green has argued that only a quarter of young Palestinian citizens currently intend to vote, but that a truly shared party could double that figure. If that is true, the party would not be dividing the existing anti-Netanyahu vote so much as enlarging it, drawing in citizens who would otherwise have sat the election out altogether.
There is a principled dimension here too. In a political culture where Jewish and Arab citizens overwhelmingly vote for separate parties, and where Arab lists have been treated by much of the Jewish mainstream as untouchable coalition partners, a party built on equal partnership is a quiet rebuke to that separation. Its very existence insists that the two communities need not be political strangers.
The Case for Caution
And yet the caution is real, and it is not merely the grumbling of rivals. Israel’s electoral threshold requires a party to win at least 3.25 per cent of the national vote, roughly four seats, to enter the Knesset at all. Fall below it, and every vote cast is simply discarded. As things stand, opinion polls have consistently placed Makom Lekulanu beneath that line. Should it remain there on election day, the votes it attracts would not strengthen the opposition but they would vanish from the count entirely.
It would not be the first party to face that fate. Benny Gantz, a former defense minister who not long ago was spoken of as a possible prime minister, now leads a party, Blue and White, that recent surveys put at around one per cent, well under the threshold and, on current form, likely to waste every vote it wins. If a figure of that weight can fall so far, a small new movement has every reason to worry.
That risk carries unusual weight this year. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc of Likud, the ultra-Orthodox and the far-right parties has been stuck in the surveys at around fifty seats, short of the sixty-one needed to govern. The largest opposition party is now Yashar, led by the former army chief Gadi Eisenkot, which in recent polls has edged just ahead of Netanyahu’s Likud. Yet the opposition has not been able to turn the government’s weakness into a majority of its own. Setting the Arab parties aside, the main opposition has been hovering somewhere around sixty seats, close enough that a single party crossing or missing the threshold could decide who forms the next government. In a contest this finely balanced, a few percentage points wasted below the line is not a rounding error. It could be the difference between Netanyahu’s departure and his survival.
This is why the party’s arrival has caused genuine consternation on Israel’s left. It joins an already fragmenting field, where the traditional Arab parties have themselves been splintering, and where every new entrant raises the same anxious question: is the anti-Netanyahu vote being broadened, or merely sliced thinner? Even the party’s own supporters cannot yet be certain which it will prove to be.
The Deeper Contradiction
There is a further, more uncomfortable truth that Makom Lekulanu inadvertently exposes. The opposition is itself divided on the very question the party embodies. Some of its leaders have made clear they will not rely on Arab parties to build a government, even as the arithmetic suggests they may be unable to reach a majority without them. Others have begun, cautiously, to move. Eisenkot himself has said a minority government leaning on Arab support would be a poor outcome, but might, as a last resort, be necessary, while figures such from the extreme right such as Avigdor Liberman who only believes in a “full-on Zionist government”obviously rule it out altogether. It is a contradiction Israel’s center has never fully resolved, as it needs Arab votes to remove Netanyahu, yet balks at sharing power with Arab representatives. A party founded on equal Jewish-Arab partnership presses directly on that nerve, whether or not it ever wins a seat.
And it does so at a moment of striking asymmetry. Israel’s citizens, Jewish and Arab alike, will vote in October, as they have with almost bewildering frequency in recent years. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza last chose a parliament in 2006. This July, under mounting international pressure, President Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree setting a legislative vote for 28 November 2026, with a presidential election to follow in the early months of 2027, the first in twenty years, if they are held at all. That last phrase matters, because the very questionable excuse used by Mahmoud Abbas to sink the elections planned for 2021 have not gone away, among them the unresolved question of voting in East Jerusalem and now the devastation of Gaza. The probability is that Mahmoud Abbas will find a similar excuse not to hold the palestinian parliamentary elections and thus dodge the subsequent presidential elections which he will, on past form, cancel, in order to retain his grip on power. For Israelis, an election is a fixed and familiar certainty. For Palestinians a short distance away, even a scheduled one remains a promise that may yet dissolve. Whatever becomes of Makom Lekulanu, the sight of Arabs and Jews contesting an election together on equal terms is a reminder of a democratic possibility that, for millions, is still out of reach.
Whether the party crosses the threshold or falls short, it has already done something worth noting. It has forced a conversation that Israeli politics has long preferred to avoid, about who belongs, who governs, and whether partnership can be more than a slogan. The answer will come in October and the question is overdue.
Meanwhile, in the background, attitudes remain confrontational
Whatever Makom Lekulanu manages on election day, the electorate it is courting looks, by the numbers, deeply unpersuaded of the partnership it proposes. A recent survey of Israel’s public opinion by Tel Aviv University finds that support for negotiations with the Palestinian Authority among the Jewish public sits at just 29 per cent, barely up from 26 per cent in March and still well within the depressed range that has held since 7 October 2023. Among Arab respondents the figure is 81 per cent, a rebound from a dip earlier in the year. The gap runs deeper on the right specifically: only 7 per cent of self-identified right-wing Jewish respondents support negotiations at all, against 83 per cent on the left, and only 7 per cent of coalition voters, against 63 per cent of opposition voters. Even belief that talks would actually produce peace is thin, just 12 per cent among Jewish respondents versus 48 per cent among Arabs, suggesting that even a rise in appetite for negotiations is not matched by any real expectation of success.
The same survey finds no majority solution on the Jewish side of the ledger. Annexation with limited rights for Palestinians remains the most popular option, though it has slipped from 38 to 33 per cent, continuation of the status quo has fallen from 31 to 25 per cent, the two-state solution holds steady at 24 per cent, and a binational state trails on 6 per cent. Arab respondents, by contrast, remain clear: 71 per cent back a two-state solution, unchanged from the previous round, while support for a binational state has fallen sharply, from 51 to 39 per cent. On settlements, the divide is starker still, with 63 per cent of Jewish respondents supporting expansion on grounds of historical right and 66 per cent on security grounds, against just 10 per cent of Arab respondents on either count.
There is a sliver of movement worth noting. When respondents are asked to imagine Trump’s Gaza plan fully implemented, Jewish support for negotiations jumps from 29 to 43 per cent, and the number of individuals shifting from opposition to support outweighs those moving the other way by roughly twenty to one. But support for the plan itself is eroding on both sides, down to 47 per cent among Jewish respondents from 61 per cent last November, and down to 54 per cent among Arab respondents from 72 per cent over the same period. And where the two publics diverge most sharply is on sequencing: only 27 per cent of Jewish respondents support transferring authority to a Palestinian government of experts before Hamas is disarmed, against 58 per cent of Arab respondents who favour exactly that order. It is, on the evidence of these numbers, a public still bracing for confrontation even as a handful of candidates try to build something else.
