Yousef Jabareen

Yousef Jabareen returns to national politics as the face of the revived Joint List, and his standing is bound up with the fate of the list he leads. A jurist from Umm al-Fahm with a doctorate from Georgetown University who was promoted to professor this year, he served in the Knesset for Hadash from 2015 to 2021 and was the first Arab member of the Knesset to chair the Committee on the Rights of the Child. In May 2026, after Ayman Odeh announced he would not run again, he won the primary to head the Hadash list, and in August he was placed at the top of the joint list of Hadash, Ta'al and Balad, with Ahmad Tibi in second place. The past month has raised his profile: the Central Elections Committee disqualified the list on September 23 following disqualification requests, including one from Likud; the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the disqualification on October 2; and on October 10 Jabareen offered an outside "safety net" to any government that replaces Netanyahu — not a blank check, but conditional on negotiations over a funded plan to fight crime in Arab society, an end to the policy of home demolitions and a diplomatic horizon toward a Palestinian state. Outside his camp the offer reads very differently: Likud's campaign warns that Gadi Eisenkot will be unable to form a government without the Arab parties, and Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman have already ruled out a government that relies on them. Opinion of Jabareen is likely to split sharply, and Arab turnout on October 27 will be the clearest test of his authority.