Mansour Abbas is betting on a Zionist to make Palestinian votes count

Palestinian political analyst and researcher from inside Israel.

When Raam leader Mansour Abbas appeared alongside former Yesh Atid lawmaker Yoav Segalovich this week and announced that Segalovich would run second on the party’s electoral slate, much of the immediate attention went to the obvious novelty: An Israeli Jewish politician, openly Zionist and a former police major-general, running near the top of the list of a conservative Islamist Arab party. That combination is unusual, and it was meant to look unusual.

Jewish participation in political lists representing Palestinian citizens of Israel is not, in itself, unprecedented. Hadash was built around a Jewish-Arab political tradition and has for decades included Jewish candidates and lawmakers. Ofer Cassif sits in the Knesset today as one of its most outspoken Jewish members. What is distinctive about the Abbas-Segalovich arrangement is not that a Jew is running with an Arab list. It is the kind of Jewish political voice Abbas has chosen to place there: a Zionist former senior police commander whose political biography sits comfortably inside the Israeli mainstream, not outside it.

Segalovich is joining Raam’s slate, not Raam itself, and the difference is easy to miss if one stops at the photograph. According to the arrangement, he will join the electoral list and parliamentary faction but will not become a member of the party. Raam’s constitution and internal decision-making structure will not change. Segalovich is also expected to retain the freedom to vote independently on questions where the ideological distance is obvious, including religion and state, security and LGBTQ rights. Abbas is not converting Raam into a Zionist party and Segalovich is not becoming an Islamist. They are testing whether two political identities that remain quite far apart can inhabit the same electoral vehicle.

I am not convinced that the main purpose of the move is electoral, at least not in the simple sense of adding more votes. Segalovich may bring some. An August Channel 13 poll suggested that a slate including him could perform somewhat better than Raam has in other surveys, and he retains unusual credibility among Arab local leaders because of his work on organised crime while serving as deputy public security minister in coalition governments led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid.

In that period he became one of the few senior Jewish officials associated in Arab public memory not only with promises about crime, but with a governmental programme that actually tried to confront it. That helps Abbas now, when criminal violence remains one of the most immediate concerns of Palestinian citizens of Israel. The arithmetic still looks secondary. What Abbas is trying to change is the political value of the seats he expects to win.

Since breaking with the Joint List and entering the Bennett-Lapid coalition in 2021, Abbas has pursued a fairly consistent experiment. His argument, sometimes stated directly and sometimes only through practice, is that Palestinian citizens of Israel have accumulated representation without converting enough of it into governing power.

Arab parties could win ten, thirteen or fifteen seats and still be treated as politically untouchable when coalitions were formed. He tried to break that wall by making Raam available for coalition politics, including with parties whose positions on the Palestinian question were very far from his own. For a short period it worked, then it didn’t.