Jewish ex-police official joins Arab-Israeli party ahead of election

JERUSALEM: A former Israeli police official will run on the election list of the moderate Islamist party Raam in upcoming polls, its leader announced Monday, making him the first Jewish Israeli to stand for an explicitly Arab party. Mansour Abbas, the head of Raam, said his party would be running on an anti-crime platform in the October 27 election, and had chosen to do so “with the man who led this fight with us and proved himself in it: Yoav Segalovitz.” Segalovitz until recently served as a member of the Knesset with centrist Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party, having entered the legislature in 2019. He had previously been deputy minister of national security in a broad coalition government led by Lapid and right-winger Naftali Bennett. In 2021, Abbas had signed an unprecedented accord to join that coalition, which brought together parties from the left, right and center. That support enabled him to secure promises of billions of dollars for Israel’s sizeable Arab minority, made up of descendants of Palestinians who remained on their land when the State of Israel was created in 1948. But many Arab Israelis at the time saw the agreement as a betrayal, while many Jewish voters criticized Bennett for the alliance. Segalovitz acknowledged on Monday that “there is a difficult history between Arabs and Jews in this country, but there is also a shared future.” “Is it possible to create political cooperation between people who are so different? I think so,” he continued. “I have no intention of changing Mansour or Raam, and they will not change me either. But it is possible to cooperate politically on the basis of trust, recognition of our differences, and a commitment to joint action,” he added. Abbas, for his part, said: “To create change, we have to see the other. Raam isn’t afraid of change, it pushes it forward.” While the communist party Hadash has had both Arab and Jewish candidates, Segalovitz will be the first Jewish Israeli to run for an explicitly Arab party. The latest polls show Raam winning five or six seats in the 120-member Knesset. Right-wing Likud, the party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said in a statement that “not even Segalovitz will be able to conceal the fact that Mansour Abbas refuses to recognize Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations and is pushing for the creation of a Palestinian state.” Abbas has repeatedly condemned Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, which sparked the Gaza war.

Read the original article ↗