Barely does a day go by that the Balad Party does not in some way challenge the other parties that comprise the Joint List, a unified slate of predominantly Arab parties. The scandals and provocations engineered by the party have often embarrassed other Arab lawmakers and political activists. However, they almost always refrained from reacting in public, adhering to the commitment made when the alliance was established in 2015 to wash their dirty laundry at home and not to give their many detractors any reason to crow over their internal differences. They were especially loathe to give any satisfaction to the head of the Yisrael Beitenu party, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman, whose party had pushed through legislation raising the electoral threshold in order to keep the (small) Arab parties out of the Knesset. At the time, Liberman’s initiative pushed four Arab parties to unite into one large Knesset list.

Since the birth of the Joint List in January 2015 in Nazareth, its members have managed admirably to resolve the problems arising from their innate ideological and social differences behind closed doors.

When Balad Knesset member Haneen Zoabi was shown on July 28 at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount confronting Israeli police, the cops were not the only ones keeping themselves in check to avoid getting dragged into the provocation she tried to engineer. Knesset members from the other Arab parties — which are part of the Joint List — barely concealed their chagrin at her conduct, but held their tongues.

When her fellow party lawmaker Basel Ghattas was caught smuggling cellphones to Palestinian prisoners jailed for security-related offenses and sentenced to two year’s imprisonment, the most that Israeli reporters were able to elicit from members of the Joint List was that they were surprised.