The Popular Arab Bloc was an electoral list that contested the 1949 Israeli Constituent Assembly election

Israeli legislative election, 1949

Elections for the Constituent Assembly were held in newly independent Israel on 25 January 1949. Voter turnout was 86.9%. Two days after its first meeting on 14 February 1949, legislators voted to change the name of the body to the Knesset...

. The list was launched by Mapam

Mapam

Mapam was a political party in Israel and is one of the ancestors of the modern-day Meretz party.-History:Mapam was formed by a January 1948 merger of the Hashomer Hatzair Workers Party and Ahdut HaAvoda Poale Zion Movement. The party was originally Marxist-Zionist in its outlook and represented...

, just three weeks before the election, in order to mobilize Israeli Arab

Arab citizens of Israel

Arab citizens of Israel refers to citizens of Israel who are not Jewish, and whose cultural and linguistic heritage or ethnic identity is Arab....

 votes. As Mapam did not allow Arabs to be members of the party, it preferred to set up a separate list for Arabs. The election campaigning was done under the supervision of the Mapam Arab Affairs Department, led by Aharon Cohen

Aharon Cohen

Aharon Cohen was a senior member of Mapam, a pro-USSR Israeli political party which existed during the first two decades of statehood.Born, 1910, in Britchany, Bessarabia in what was the Tsarist empire, now Romania. He came to Palestine in 1929 where he joined kibbutz Sha'ar Ha'amakin, near Haifa....

. The list obtained 2,812 votes, failing to cross the 1% electoral threshold (4,347 votes) required to win a seat.

By the time of the next elections

Israeli legislative election, 1951

Elections for the second Knesset were held in Israel on 30 July 1951. Voter turnout was 75.1%.-Results:¹ Rostam Bastuni, Avraham Berman and Moshe Sneh left Mapam and set up the Left Faction. Bastuni later returned to Mapam whilst Berman and Sneh joined Maki. Hannah Lamdan and David Livschitz left...

 in 1951, Mapam had allowed Arabs to gain membership, with Rostam Bastuni

Rostam Bastuni

Rostam Bastuni was an Israeli politician and journalist, and the first Arab citizen of Israel to represent a Zionist party in the Knesset.-Biography:Bastuni was born into a Christian family in Mandate Palestine from the mixed city of Haifa...

being elected on the party's list.