Mansour Abbas bets on a Zionist to make Arab votes count

The striking image of a Jewish Zionist former police major-general standing second on the electoral list of a conservative Islamist Arab party is exactly what Mansour Abbas wants voters to notice. Raam's leader has joined forces with former Yesh Atid lawmaker Yoav Segalovich in an effort to change how Arab seats operate in Israeli coalition politics.

Jewish candidates on lists representing Palestinian citizens of Israel are not unprecedented. Hadash has long followed a Jewish-Arab political tradition, and Ofer Cassif remains one of its most outspoken Jewish lawmakers. The Abbas-Segalovich arrangement is different because of the political identity Segalovich brings: a Zionist former senior police commander whose career sits within the Israeli mainstream.

Segalovich is joining Raam's slate, not the party itself. Under the agreement, he will join the electoral list and parliamentary faction without becoming a party member. Raam's constitution and internal decision-making structure will remain unchanged. Segalovich is also expected to vote independently on issues where the ideological gap is clear, including religion and state, security and LGBTQ rights.

The move could bring Raam additional support. An August Channel 13 poll indicated that a slate including Segalovich might perform somewhat better than Raam in other surveys. He also retains credibility among Arab local leaders because of his work against organized crime as deputy public security minister in coalition governments led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid.

That record matters to Abbas because criminal violence remains a pressing concern among Palestinian citizens of Israel. Yet the electoral arithmetic appears secondary. Since leaving the Joint List and joining the Bennett-Lapid coalition in 2021, Abbas has pursued an experiment aimed at making the seats he expects to win more valuable in coalition negotiations. The alliance with Segalovich tests whether two political identities that remain far apart can share an electoral vehicle without either side abandoning its core position.