Former MK Yousef Jabareen elected leader of Arab-majority party Hadash

Leadership shakeup comes as two MKs step down; Jabareen pushes to revive Joint List; sole woman wins fifth slot

Former MK Yousef Jabareen was overwhelmingly elected leader of the Arab-majority Hadash party in internal primaries on Saturday, winning 82% of the vote, according to the party. He will become the faction’s first new chairman in over a decade, as Arab parties face mounting pressure to unite ahead of the upcoming elections.

The legal scholar and longtime Hadash activist will replace current chairman Ayman Odeh, who has led the party since 2015. Odeh did not seek reelection and will resign at the end of the current Knesset term. Jabareen previously served in the Knesset from 2015 to 2021.

After thanking voters for their trust, Jabareen focused his remarks mainly on a call to re-establish the Joint List of Arab parties, saying this was “what the moment demands, and what our public is calling for.

“I call on all members of the Joint List to rally and move forward in negotiations, and become an influential and decisive political force,” Jabareen said in a statement.

Hadash has championed re-establishing the Joint List, which was first formed in 2015, and which at its peak in 2020 won 15 seats in the Knesset, in order to maximize the Arab community’s political power.

In January, Hadash, the Islamist United Arab List (Ra’am), secularist Ta’al and nationalist Balad signed an agreement committing to work toward a joint run. But more than four months later, negotiations have yielded little progress. With the Arab public seeking government resources to fight an unprecedented wave of deadly crime plaguing their communities, grassroots pressure has mounted for the revival of the Joint List.

Hadash has framed the upcoming elections as “critical” and has vowed to topple the current coalition.

Jabareen promised to “do everything to prevent the government of [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, [National Security Minister Itamar] Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich from continuing for another term,” and to fight for “equality, for democracy and for peace, together with the Jewish democratic forces.”

Saturday’s vote, in which senior party members elected the top six candidates for the Arab-Jewish party slate, marked the first party primaries of the 2026 campaign season. Only a handful of Israeli parties, including Netanyahu’s Likud and Yair Golan’s The Democrats, use primaries to select their Knesset slates.

It comes as lawmakers from both the opposition and coalition appear poised to dissolve the Knesset and bring the election forward by as much as two months.

Jabareen, who hails from the Arab city of Umm al-Fahm in the so-called Triangle region southeast of Haifa, represents both a geographic and political shift for Hadash, which has long been dominated by leaders from northern and coastal cities such as Haifa and Tel Aviv.

Activists from the Triangle, home to roughly 250,000 Arab citizens and heavily affected by violent crime, have increasingly pushed for greater representation within the party, and Jabareen’s election is expected to boost political engagement and voter turnout in the region.

His ascent marks a broader reshuffling underway within the Communist Hadash, as two of the party’s three current MKs prepare to leave parliamentary politics.

The results of Saturday’s primaries also leave Hadash, which has traditionally emphasized women’s representation as part of its platform, without a woman in its top four slots for the first time in more than a decade.

Elected next in line after Jabareen were human rights activist Jafar Farah, MK Ofer Cassif and former MK Youssef Atauna in spots two through four on the party’s Knesset slate, with Nihaya Wishahy, the sole woman, in fifth.

Farah, who heads the Mossawa rights group, will replace Hadash number two MK Aida Touma-Sliman, who did not seek reelection after 11 years in the Knesset.

In 2019, a police officer was indicted for allegedly beating Farah and breaking his knee following his arrest at a Gaza solidarity protest in Haifa the previous year.

Cassif was reelected to the third spot on the slate, traditionally reserved for a Jewish candidate, after defeating party activist Noa Levy. He is the only current MK expected to retain his seat.

Atauna defeated former Arraba mayor Omar Wahad Nasser and activist and journalist Nadra Saadi Abu Dabi for the fourth slot. A Bedouin politician from the Negev, he served in the Knesset from 2017 to 2025 before resigning under a rotation agreement between Hadash and Ta’al, which ran together in the 2022 elections.

His return, alongside Jabareen, underscores Hadash’s effort to broaden its appeal beyond its traditional bases and challenge Ra’am for support among Bedouin voters in the Negev and voters in the Triangle region.

Wishahy, elected to the fifth slot after all other candidates withdrew their candidacies, was the only woman elected to the slate after female candidates were repeatedly defeated in races for the slate’s second through fourth slots.