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

What the report says

Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas has brought former Yesh Atid lawmaker Yoav Segalovich onto his party’s electoral slate, placing him second in a move meant to signal that Arab votes can be treated as usable in Israeli coalition politics. The arrangement was announced in Nazareth on August 31, 2026, and Al Jazeera describes it as unusual because Segalovich is a Zionist, Jewish former senior police official rather than a member of Ra’am.

According to the report, Segalovich is joining the list and parliamentary faction but not the party itself. Ra’am’s internal structure is not expected to change, and Segalovich would retain room to vote independently on issues where his views differ from the party’s, including religion and state, security and LGBTQ rights. The article says Abbas is not trying to turn Ra’am into a Zionist party; instead, he appears to be testing whether a shared electoral vehicle can make the party more acceptable to mainstream Israeli coalition partners.

The move comes after Abbas’s earlier experiment with coalition politics in 2021, when Ra’am joined the Bennett-Lapid government. Al Jazeera notes that the strategy briefly gave Arab citizens of Israel a path to governing influence, but that the wider political climate changed after the October 7 attacks and the war that followed. Since then, opposition parties have been more hesitant to rely on Arab support, and figures such as Avigdor Liberman have rejected Ra’am as a coalition partner.

The article frames the decision as part of a longer debate in Palestinian politics inside Israel: whether Arab parties should prioritize collective representation through alliances such as the Joint List, or accept greater ideological compromise in exchange for access to government power and budgets.