From the Liveblog of
Sunday, November 1, 2026
Netanyahu posts old Ra’am platform, falsely says it is Mansour Abbas’s
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posts a Ra’am party platform from more than two decades ago and falsely attributes it to MK Mansour Abbas, who only took the helm of the traditionalist Arab party in 2018 and backed away from some of its earlier Islamist views.
According to the Israeli Democracy Institute, the document shared by Netanyahu is the Ra’am party platform from Israel’s 1999 elections. The party was established in 1996 as a political arm of the Islamic Movement’s Southern Branch.
Among the positions contained in the old Ra’am platform are “ending the Israeli occupation and establishing a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem,” “granting a right of return to all Palestinian refugees in accordance with international law,” “releasing all Palestinian prisoners,” “canceling the racist Law of Return” that lets Jews automatically become citizens in Israel, and “legislating a constitution in Israel that recognizes its Arab citizens as a national minority, and changing state symbols accordingly.”
“This is Mansour Abbas’s platform. No government can be formed with him,” writes Netanyahu, who lost his parliamentary majority in Tuesday’s election on the heels of unprecedented Arab turnout that has made Ra’am and the Arab-majority Joint List kingmakers.
In fact, since taking the helm of Ra’am, Abbas has declared that he was severing ties with the Islamic Movement, and that “Israel was born as a Jewish state and so it will remain.”
He also ran in Tuesday’s election with a Zionist former lawmaker and senior police officer, Yoav Segalovitz, at No. 2 on the Ra’am candidate slate.
Under Abbas, Ra’am also conducted negotiations on joining a Netanyahu-led coalition after the 2021 election, but the move was nixed by Religious Zionism chief Bezalel Smotrich and Ra’am ended up joining the so-called “change government” that unseated Netanyahu in 2021-2022.
Abbas responded to Netanyahu’s false post: “Netanyahu is well aware of the Ra’am platform and its demands” since they were enshrined in their 2021 coalition agreements that failed to materialize and in the 2019 memorandum of understanding that Abbas has said Netanyahu tried to woo him with.
The Times of Israel Community.