ISRAELI communists have dismissed a bid by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman to get the new United List coalition barred from standing in the general election.

Mr Lieberman is claiming that Balad, one of the parties involved in the new grouping which brings together the communist Hadash Party with several Israeli Arab parties in a joint slate, “supports terrorism.”

“It is obvious that this so-called petition is yet another populist move on the part of the racist Lieberman,” Hadash stated.

“It is even clearer that this petition is an expression of the fear gripping him as he watches his party’s collapse in the polls in contrast to that of the United List. We will see the response to the racism of the right on election day, when the United List wins more than 15 seats in the Knesset.”

Mr Lieberman’s far-right Yisrael Beteinu party is performing poorly following a spate of corruption scandals and United List hopes to beat it to become the third-largest group in Israel’s parliament.

United List was announced last Thursday and marks a significant shift by the communists, who acknowledge that the alliance with Arab parties Balad, Ra’am and Ta’al is “ideologically disparate.”

But the coalition is a necessary response to a “fundamentally anti-democratic” new law pushed through at Yisrael Beteinu’s instigation which says a party must win 3.25 per cent of the vote — equivalent to four Knesset seats — in order to sit in the assembly at all.

“In the outgoing Knesset, none of the Arab parties on its own had four representatives. Only a previous alliance between Ta’al and Ra’am gave them four seats.

“Hadash as a united Arab-Jewish front also received four, but just barely.

“The threat of the Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel being significantly disenfranchised was real and imminent.

“Under such dire circumstances, the parties were compelled to consider joining forces, despite their ideological differences, in order to retain representation in the Knesset for the Arab-Palestinian minority in Israel, the true target of Lieberman and co’s draconian legislation,” the Communist Party explained.