Mohammad Barakeh

Barakeh was born in Shefa-'Amr and studied mathematics at Tel Aviv University.[1] During his university years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he headed the Association of Arab Students in Israel and helped establish and organize a Jewish-Arab student group known as CAMPUS or KAMPOOS. The group brought together left-wing Jewish and Arab students for political activity and opposed what they described as the occupation of the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria — and the Gaza Strip while advocating equality for Arabs in Israel.[1][3]

In June 1982, Barakeh hosted at his Tel Aviv apartment a planning meeting for the first demonstration against the Lebanon War. After completing his studies, he returned to Shefa-'Amr and became active in the local branch of the Israeli Communist Party, Maki. His later organizational roles included membership in the party’s political bureau and participation in the leadership of bodies concerned with Arab lands, the newspaper Al-Ittihad, the Emil Touma Institute for Research, and the International Center for Peace in the Middle East.[1][3]

Barakeh was first elected to the Knesset in 1999 as a representative of Hadash, the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality.[1] He served in the Knesset from 1999 to 2015, across five consecutive Knessets.[2][8] During his parliamentary career, he was a deputy speaker, chaired Hadash’s faction, and chaired the Knesset committee on drug abuse.[3][2] In the 17th Knesset, he served on the House, Finance, and Public Petitions committees and as a substitute member of the Education, Culture and Sports Committee. In the 1999 election he also ran for Knesset speaker, losing to Avraham Burg.[3]

Barakeh became a prominent Hadash figure and served as its chairman during the 2000s. He headed the party’s slate in the 2009 election and was first on its list in 2013, when Hadash won four seats with 111,685 votes, or 3.12 percent of the total.[9][10] In 2008, he described Hadash as a Jewish-Arab party and said that a merger with the grassroots Tarabut movement was intended to strengthen its profile among Jewish voters, while emphasizing the party’s pride in its Arab members.[11] New party leaders later pressed incumbent Hadash representatives, including Barakeh, to withdraw from the list for the 2015 election.[12]

In December 2004, Barakeh was appointed to head a Knesset subcommittee tasked with tracking the needs of the Israeli-Arab sector and recommending changes to the following year’s budget.[4] His legislative initiatives included protecting state funds transferred to local authorities for education from seizure, undoing municipal mergers involving Shaghur, Ir HaCarmel, and Baqa-Jatt, and postponing the phased increase in women’s retirement age from 62 to 64 until 2017.[3]

Barakeh expressed support for a two-state solution and for permitting Israeli citizens displaced from their villages to return. He also proposed changing the national anthem or adopting separate national and civil anthems, explaining that he could not identify with the existing anthem’s words.[5] In an October 2010 discussion after a meeting in Ramallah between Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Palestinian Knesset members, Barakeh said Abbas and the Palestinian leadership refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and rejected population swaps; he characterized proposed Israeli arrangements as dangerous to Palestinians on both sides of the 1948 lines.[13]

After leaving the Knesset, Barakeh continued in party and civic leadership. In 2015 he was elected chair of the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel.[8] The committee is an umbrella organization coordinating political activity among Arab MKs, municipal leaders, organizations, and other community figures. Its remit encompasses national questions, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as local civic concerns.[14] Barakeh said he intended to represent both Palestinian national issues and the everyday concerns of Arab citizens, including education, social matters, and infrastructure, and to restore public trust in the committee.[8]

As committee chairman, Barakeh opposed Israel’s 2018 Nation-State Law and promoted a campaign for its repeal, including outreach to international bodies and plans for demonstrations. He said the committee spoke for the general Arab public rather than a particular party or movement.[6] The committee planned a mass demonstration in Tel Aviv in August 2018; an analysis of the period noted strategic tensions between the committee’s activist approach and the Joint List’s less prominent participation.[15]

Barakeh also addressed crime and public safety in Arab communities. In November 2019, he announced a protest tent and hunger strike with Knesset members and local and regional council leaders, seeking attention to killings and illegal weapons. He argued that responsibility for personal and collective security lay with the Public Security Minister.[16] In 2017, after three Arab citizens killed two police officers at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, Barakeh condemned the attack, said it did not represent the Arab Israeli community, and rejected the use of weapons in Arab political activity.[17]

In April 2022, Barakeh led an Arab Israeli delegation, including lawyers from Adalah, to meet United Nations officials in Jordan. He described the inquiry as the first UN investigation to examine the legal status of Arab Israelis rather than Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and criticized Israel’s refusal to cooperate with the committee.[18] He also attended a September 2020 video conference between Ramallah and Beirut that brought together Palestinian factions in a display of unity responding to the Israel–United Arab Emirates normalization agreement.[19]

Barakeh’s statements on Jerusalem and Palestinian politics have drawn attention. In an October 15, 2014 Facebook post, he wrote that Jerusalem and al-Aqsa “will not remain alone” and called for al-Aqsa’s liberation through defeating the occupation and declaring Jerusalem the capital of Palestine.[20] Two days later, speaking at a protest near Jerusalem’s Lions’ Gate, he said Arab citizens of Israel were present “because of a duty” and as compensation for the inability of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to visit the city.[20]

In 2018, Barakeh was quoted in a radio interview describing Israel as “an imperialist invention of Balfour.”[21] In 2022, he spoke at a Land Day rally near Gaza City, criticizing Israeli actions in the West Bank and Jerusalem and referring to the Gaza blockade and settlement expansion; the account of his remarks was attributed to the Shehab website.[22] Palestinian Media Watch reported that remarks published by the Palestinian Authority daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida in April 2025 credited Abu Jihad and Yasser Arafat with initiating the First Intifada and described it as having brought “unprecedented achievements for the Palestinian people.”[23]

A Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs commentary described a Hadash campaign led by Barakeh in January 2002 alongside a later march to Ramallah led by Knesset member Ahmad Tibi. The article’s interpretation of the political significance of those events is the author’s view, rather than an independently established finding.[24] Another commentary asserted that Barakeh often visited Ramallah and took part in Palestinian Authority and Fatah events; those claims were not independently corroborated by the other material in the research bundle.[25]

Barakeh faced legal proceedings arising from demonstrations. In 2009, the attorney general decided to file charges alleging assaulting a police officer, insulting a public official, and obstructing a police officer; Barakeh called the decision political and argued that participation in demonstrations was part of an MK’s role.[3] In 2014, a court convicted him of assaulting a civilian during a 2006 Tel Aviv protest, while acquitting him of a separate allegation involving a soldier at Bil’in.[26] The conviction in the civilian assault case was overturned in 2015; other charges had previously been dismissed.[27]

In November 2023, police detained Barakeh and other Arab Israeli public figures as they traveled to a planned anti-war protest in Nazareth. Police said the demonstration had not been approved because they believed it could lead to incitement and harm public order; after his release, Barakeh said the detention was intended to suppress their voices.[28][7]

In June 2026, police arrested and questioned Barakeh about a speech he gave in Ramallah in December 2022 at a rally marking Fatah’s founding. Police alleged that the speech praised and identified with terrorists and called for struggle against Israel; media reports also attributed to him comparisons of Israel with Nazi Germany and calls for armed resistance against the occupation. Hadash and the High Follow-Up Committee denounced the arrest as politically motivated.[29][7] A court rejected a request to bar him from traveling abroad but imposed a 30-day ban on entering the West Bank. The allegations and responses were reported as part of an investigation, not as a finding of guilt.[29][7]