Netanyahu’s Threshold Trap Forced the Jewish-Arab Party Off Israel’s October Ballot While Bereaved Activists Still Name the Gaza Genocide

Benjamin Netanyahu did not need a new idea to keep a Jewish-Arab party off the October 27 ballot. He already had the threshold. A Place for Us All, the list built by Standing Together leaders Rula Daood and Alon-Lee Green, announced on September 8 that it would not run. The party said it was stepping aside out of a sense of responsibility and to avoid wasting opposition votes, after talks to join the revived Joint List failed. That sentence is the whole trap. In Israel a list that falls under 3.25 percent of the national vote wins nothing, and the ballots disappear. Netanyahu has spent years warning his base about Arab voters, then using a rule written in percentages to make a shared Jewish-Arab ticket look like a gift to his own bloc.

The people who built that ticket were not campaign consultants. Yonatan Zeigen, whose mother Vivian Silver was killed at Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, 2023, joined the slate because he wanted a political home that was not a Jewish party with an Arab guest, or an Arab party with a Jewish guest. Maoz Inon, whose parents Bilha and Yakovi Inon were killed the same morning at Netiv HaAsara, and Palestinian peace activist Aziz Abu Sarah, whose brother Tayseer died after torture in Israeli custody, have spent the years since refusing the revenge script Netanyahu sold as policy. Their work sits outside the Knesset. The withdrawal shows what happens when that work tries to become a seat.

Why the Jewish-Arab party left the October 27 ballot

A Place for Us All launched on June 16 as Makom Lekulanu, Hebrew for a place for everyone. Daood and Green, co-directors of Standing Together, called it a political home for Jews and Arabs working for peace, equality, and an end to the occupation. Zeigen told reporters the partnership was the point. He said his mother’s death had forced a decision, and that the killing was not preventable with guns or by moving soldiers around. It was preventable, he said, only by ending the occupation and solving the conflict. Reuters reported on July 29 that the new list was already being treated as a risk to the effort to unseat Netanyahu, because small parties soak up votes that yield no seats.

Green said the party would not run if it could not clear the threshold. Yousef Jabareen of Hadash told the newcomers to recalculate. By September 8 the talks to join the Joint List had failed. Staying on the ballot would have split voters Netanyahu wants staying home or casting ballots that never become mandates. The withdrawal was an admission that the electoral math punishes the partnership the party was built to prove.

How Netanyahu turns 3.25 percent into a wasted vote

Israel’s Knesset has 120 seats. A list needs 3.25 percent, about four seats, or it gets zero. Surplus-vote deals cannot rescue a list that never crosses the line. Netanyahu’s coalition has spent the campaign pushing smaller right-wing factions to merge so their votes are not thrown away. The opposition has signed surplus deals of its own. None of that helped A Place for Us All once the Joint List door closed. The threshold did the work a ban is supposed to do, without a court hearing.

That is the strategy. Warn that Arab citizens will decide the government. Then make a joint Jewish-Arab experiment look reckless to anyone who wants Netanyahu gone. The assessments Britain wrote to keep arms licences moving while Gaza was being destroyed sit in the same file as this ballot trick. The international news file at The AEGIS Alliance has tracked both.

Maoz Inon and Aziz Abu Sarah refuse the revenge script

Inon grew up beside the Gaza fence. On the morning of October 7 his parents‘ house at Netiv HaAsara was burned to the foundation. Two days later, he has said, his family made a decision to reject revenge, because revenge would not bring Bilha and Yakovi back and would only feed the cycle. The next day a message arrived from Aziz Abu Sarah, a Palestinian from occupied East Jerusalem whom Inon had met briefly in 2014. Abu Sarah offered condolences. Inon has called that message a hand that pulled him out of the grief. „I lost so much, but I won Aziz as a brother,“ he has said.

Abu Sarah’s brother Tayseer was taken by Israeli soldiers, accused of throwing stones, and died in 1990 from injuries suffered in custody. The two men addressed the UN Security Council in September and co-authored The Future Is Peace. Inon said Hamas had committed an atrocious war crime on October 7, and that the Israeli government exploited those atrocities for a war of revenge, destruction in Gaza, and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Abu Sarah said the divide is not Israelis versus Palestinians. It is between those who believe in peace, justice, and equality, and those who do not. He called for sanctions without partiality.

On the third anniversary Inon said the government had used Israeli trauma to move from conflict management to ethnic cleansing, in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem, and across most of Gaza. He does not treat Netanyahu as his leader. Netanyahu is the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, and of a corruption trial running since 2020. Inon has said the prime minister should clear his name at The Hague rather than draft the dead into the next war.

Yonatan Zeigen will not lend his mother’s name to the killing

Zeigen marked the same anniversary at Kibbutz Be’eri, where more than 100 people were killed and where his mother, the Israeli-Canadian peace activist Vivian Silver, was murdered. He has written that politicians who use her name to justify mass killing in Gaza are wrong intellectually and morally. Silver spent decades arguing for Jewish-Arab partnership. She was not in power. Governments rejected her vision. Treating her life as proof that Israel already tried peace, Zeigen has said, is a facade. If that vision had been state policy, he believes October 7 would not have happened.

He is not hopeful that October 27 will change the system. Opposition parties, he has said, are working to replace Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Bezalel Smotrich, and are not offering an end to the occupation. Parents Circle – Families Forum, the bereaved Israeli and Palestinian group he works with, is banned from schools under this government. Dialogue about shared humanity is treated as dangerous. He calls hope the labor of closing the gap between the life people have and the life that is possible. Leaving the ballot was the price of not handing Netanyahu a pile of voided votes.

The committee ban that tried to erase Arab lists

The threshold was not the only instrument. On September 23 the Central Elections Committee, where Netanyahu’s coalition holds the majority, voted to disqualify the Joint List and Ra’am, and to bar Balad leader Sami Abu Shehadeh and Hadash lawmaker Ofer Cassif. The Joint List called the decision an attempt by Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir to steal the election and silence more than a million citizens. Mansour Abbas, who leads Ra’am and who sat in the only post-2009 coalition that excluded Netanyahu, called it political, illegitimate, and anti-democratic. Al Jazeera noted that Netanyahu remained eligible to run, warrant and corruption trial notwithstanding.

The committee let Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit stay on the ballot. A body that can strike Palestinian citizens‘ lists and spare a far-right Jewish list is not a neutral referee. On a ruling reported October 6, the Supreme Court overturned the bans on the Joint List and Ra’am and restored the parties that represent much of Israel’s more than two million Palestinian citizens. The court stopped a disqualification that would have made the threshold debate irrelevant. Jewish News reported that the ruling complicates Netanyahu’s path to a coalition, because most polls show the opposition needs Ra’am’s seats to finish ahead. The Joint List has never joined a Zionist-led coalition, and nobody serious expects it to start now.

What a ballot without that party still cannot hide

Gaza’s Health Ministry, whose counts UN agencies treat as broadly reliable, has put the dead at about 74,000, with the killing continuing after the October 10, 2025 ceasefire. A UN commission of inquiry said in September 2025 that there were reasonable grounds to conclude Israeli authorities had committed four of the five acts in the Genocide Convention against Palestinians in Gaza, and named Netanyahu among those responsible for direct and public incitement. Israel rejected the finding. Rejection is not an answer to the rubble, the hospital attacks, or the detention of Palestinian medics that soldiers and courts have watched proceed without charge.

A Place for Us All will not be on the October 27 ballot. The activists who carried it there have not recanted. Inon and Abu Sarah are still asking governments to fund reconciliation and to sanction the officials who chose ethnic cleansing. Zeigen is still refusing to let Vivian Silver’s name be used as a permit for mass killing. Netanyahu’s threshold did what it was built to do. It made a Jewish-Arab list look like a luxury the opposition could not afford, then sat back while the committee tried to ban the Arab lists that remained. The court put two of those lists back. It did not put a shared party on the ballot, and it did not give a vote to anyone buried in Gaza.