In major shift, Yesh Atid MK reportedly set to run as No. 2 in Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am party

Yesh Atid MK Yoav Segalovitz is reportedly planning to run in the upcoming election on the electoral slate of Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am, becoming the party’s first Jewish candidate for Knesset.

The move would mark a landmark shift for Ra’am, which has historically been an Arab Islamist party but pivoted recently to separate from its religious roots.

Segalovitz’s switch will also impact the ongoing debate over whether the bloc of parties opposed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should partner with Arab-led factions in its bid to oust the premier. Ra’am made history in 2021 when it joined an ideologically diverse coalition to briefly unseat Netanyahu, but some opposition politicians have ruled out including Arab parties in their coalition in the October 27 election.

The Ynet news site reported that Segalovitz — a former senior police official — is currently on vacation in Thailand and, upon his return next week, will meet with Abbas to sign a deal for him to join the party.

Segalovitz intends to take the No 2 spot on Ra’am’s electoral list, a source from the Arab community close to Segalovitz told the Haaretz daily. That will make him very likely to return to the Knesset, given that the party consistently polls around five seats.

He will also be the party’s preferred candidate to become the next national security minister should Ra’am join a governing coalition, the source said.

Meanwhile, Abbas has conducted polling to determine the impact of Segalovitz’s joining of his party on the potential election results, Ynet reported.

Earlier this year, Abbas announced that his Islamist party would become a broad-based party open to Jewish candidates, and this week told Haaretz that it was completing its process of separating from the religious council to which it is linked and establishing its own institutions.

The major shifts appear to be aimed at distancing the party from hardline Muslim organizations to boost its legitimacy among Zionist Israeli parties ahead of the election.

Segalovitz is a former police major general who served as deputy public security minister in the government that unseated Netanyahu from 2021-22. He won popularity among Israeli Arabs for his stewardship of a focused government task force that successfully reduced violence in the community during his tenure.

That trend reversed when the current government took power. There have been record levels of violent crime in Arab communities under the tenure of far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.

Yesh Atid, Segalovitz’s current centrist party, has joined under the leadership of former prime minister Naftali Bennett to form the center-right “Together” slate.

Bennett has rejected Ra’am as a potential coalition partner, despite having led the 2021-2022 government that included the Islamist party. He has said his next government would include only Zionist parties and that, following the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, invasion and massacre, Israel’s coalition should not depend on a non-Zionist party.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters regularly condemn and delegitimize the Arab parties.

Former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, who polls show is Netanyahu’s chief competitor, has said he would partner with any party that accepts his three principles of Israel remaining a Jewish and democratic country,  accepting the values of the Declaration of Independence, and supporting universal mandatory conscription or national service.

Only Yair Golan, the leader of the left-wing Democrats, has openly encouraged his fellow opposition leaders to partner with Ra’am again, and urged them to “stop playing along” with the demonization of the party.

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