Mansour Abbas: Foreign-linked actors wanted Ra’am coalition with Netanyahu, who sought deal with Hamas

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought a “long-term arrangement” with Hamas in order to keep the Palestinian national movement fractured, claims Ra’am chairman Mansour Abbas in an interview with Channel 12 News.

Speaking to the outlet, the Arab lawmaker says foreign-linked actors pressured him to persist in coalition talks with Netanyahu rather than join with opposition parties, due to the premier’s pre-October 7 policy on the terror group.

When asked whether he received messages from Qatar urging him to stay with Netanyahu, Abbas refuses to confirm or deny but says he was contacted by “people from here [Israel] with links to countries abroad.”

“These people encouraged me to continue and try to form a government with Benjamin Netanyahu and not with the other side [opposition]” because Netanyahu “doesn’t do wars,” Abbas says.

“I understood that Benjamin Netanyahu had an interest in ensuring that the fragmentation on the Palestinian side was preserved,” he says, adding that the premier sought to “advance a long-term arrangement with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.”

When asked whether Netanyahu made an explicit reference to this, Abbas says: “There was reference to this issue” in coalition talks. “I understood from his words that he was in favor of an arrangement [with Hamas],” he continues, claiming that such an arrangement stood to benefit both Netanyahu and the terror group.

Later on in the interview, Abbas recalls that Netanyahu gave him “lectures” on Zionist leader Zeev Jabotinsky during the since-scuttled coalition talks between the two.

He says it was as if the premier “wanted to stress that Likud is precisely the party that is trying to advance Arab society’s standing” and thus quoted Jabotinsky’s saying that “if there is a Jewish prime minister, his deputy should be Arab.”

Abbas takes a swipe at Netanyahu, saying that “they [in Likud] aren’t faithful to the path of Jabotinsky, who is considered the right-wing party’s ideological forebear.