A Jewish MK on Ra’am’s slate could reshape the anti-Netanyahu coalition map

Tal Schneider is a Political Correspondent at The Times of Israel

Contacts between MK Mansour Abbas, leader of the Islamist Ra’am party (United Arab List), and MK Yoav Segalovitz of the centrist Yesh Atid party have been quietly simmering for quite some time.

The first public sign of a courtship was seen in January, before the passage of the state budget — a legislative milestone that signaled the ruling coalition would manage to extend its tenure through to the legally mandated election date of October 2026.

Abbas was being interviewed on Radio A-Nas, a prominent Arab Israeli station based in Nazareth, by journalists Shireen Younes and Mohammad Magadli, who questioned him about his proposed blueprint for his party’s Knesset slate. During the interview, Magadli asked: “Why not add Yoav Segalovitz as a candidate on your slate?” Abbas replied that this was indeed an idea under consideration.

Minutes after the interview, the two hosts brought Segalovitz onto the show to tell him what Abbas had said. Segalovitz responded that he was flattered by the idea but emphasized that he was staying with Yesh Atid.

Several weeks later, during a meeting at the Knesset, Abbas told me that he had examined several potential candidate names for the Ra’am election slate, though he declined to elaborate on who was tested or what the inquiries revealed.

The assessment was conducted via an internal party survey — at a time when Ra’am was still subordinate to the Shura Council, the religious leadership council of the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement — to gauge Arab society’s willingness to accept a Jewish candidate on the slate. On Friday, Younes disclosed the poll’s findings.

Ra’am polled 750 Arab citizens of Israel, asking which Jewish lawmaker was closest to their views and best represented their needs. A staggering 75% selected Segalovitz, while other prominent names — Naama Lazimi (The Democrats), Ram Ben Barak (Yesh Atid), Gilad Kariv (The Democrats), Chili Tropper, and Pnina Tamano-Shata — trailed far behind. The results were decisive.

Over the weekend, veteran columnist Nahum Barnea reported at Yedioth Ahronoth that talks between the two sides were heating up. The Times of Israel reached out on Saturday to several Ra’am representatives as well as to Segalovitz, but received no response.

Should Abbas move forward with placing Segalovitz on the slate, it would mark an innovative, highly sophisticated maneuver reflecting real political courage on both their parts.

Segalovitz has maintained deep ties with Israel’s Arab public long after the broad “change government” — which his party and Ra’am were both part of — left office in 2022. Over the four years since, various community figures confirm he has consistently toured Arab towns hit hard by rampant violent crime, kept open lines of communication with local leaders, and remained actively involved in efforts to combat organized crime in the sector.

Segalovitz is a retired police major general — a rank equivalent to a major general in the IDF — who served as head of the Investigations and Intelligence Division from 2009 to 2013 and founded Lahav 433, the police’s elite anti-corruption and organized crime unit often dubbed “Israel’s FBI.” From that perspective alone, this represents a rare political phenomenon: an Islamist Arab party placing a retired senior law enforcement officer on its ballot whose pre-politics career was spent in police uniform.

How does such a move impact the Together (Beyahad) alliance led by former prime minister Naftali Bennett and Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid? For months, every leader within the anti-Netanyahu change bloc — with the sole exception of The Democrats chief Yair Golan — has declared that they will not rely on Ra’am to form a government. They have insisted they will only partner with parties that embrace the values of the Declaration of Independence, champion national service or universal conscription, and recognize Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

Yesh Atid declined to comment directly on Segalovitz’s potential move, though it must be said that no one has been caught off guard — certainly not after that initial public exchange on Radio A-Nas. Abbas is keenly interested in the partnership. Segalovitz, meanwhile, fears that Yesh Atid’s shrinking slate under the Together umbrella will yield it no more than six or seven Knesset seats, and remains eager to serve as a cabinet minister dedicated to tackling crime in Arab society.

Yet despite Abbas’s strong enthusiasm, expectations are that he could still face headwinds at Ra’am’s party convention on August 22, where opposing voices remain, even after the party’s formal severance from the Shura Council.

Another key question is whether Segalovitz will act as a “transitional object,” easing Ra’am into a change-bloc coalition by softening public opinion on the party’s ongoing evolution — even if such a move directly contradicts the campaign promises made by bloc leaders.

For his part, Lapid has always been a master of creative political maneuvers for his bloc. In 2021, he was the architect of the historic change government, ceding the first turn as prime minister to Naftali Bennett to pull him away from Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing camp. In 2019, he stepped aside to take the second spot behind Benny Gantz. In 2022, he pressed Labor’s Merav Michaeli and Meretz’s Zehava Galon to merge their left-wing parties — a deal that fell apart and ultimately cost the bloc the election. Most recently, watching Yesh Atid collapse in the polls, he stepped back to join Bennett’s Together umbrella. His creativity, however, does not always yield success.

Had Ra’am retreated back into the arms of the joint Arab list alongside Hadash-Ta’al and the nationalist Balad party, it would have handed Netanyahu a golden campaign gift: a full-throated, anti-Arab playbook. Ra’am’s distance from the other Arab parties makes that strategy far harder for Netanyahu, particularly given his own past intensive courtship of Abbas in 2021.

Historically speaking, a political partnership between Segalovitz and Ra’am is not entirely unprecedented. Hadash, the Arab-Jewish communist alliance, has always reserved at least one slot on its slate for a Jewish representative. The most famous was Dov Khenin, a former MK who drew significant support from secular Jewish voters due to his environmental and social legislation. Still, Hadash’s Jewish-Arab synergy is anchored in a legacy of class struggle, Communist Party ideology, and historical ties between Arab and Jewish working-class movements.

Another faction attempting to offer Israeli voters a Jewish-Arab partnership is Makon Lekulanu (“A Place for All of Us”), led by Rula Daood and Alon-Lee Green. Both were prominent figures in Standing Together (Omdim Beyahad), the grassroots Jewish-Arab movement known for its signature purple shirts, which has spent the past decade organizing around social and political causes and gaining substantial visibility. At this stage, however, measuring political support for their party remains difficult, not least because A Place for All of Us has yet to register in political polling.

Ra’am, without Segalovitz, has been generally polling at about five seats, but pollsters customarily designate it alongside fellow Arab party Hadash-Ta’al, also polling at around five, as being outside both the pro- and anti-Netanyahu blocs. Bringing Segalovitz on board could not only boost Ra’am’s performance in the polls, but also move it into the anti-Netanyahu bloc — and thus remake electoral arithmetic.

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