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Ra’am leader Abbas: Judiciary the ‘primary protection’ for Arab society

Carrie Keller-Lynn is a political and legal correspondent for The Times of Israel

From right to left: Ra'am leader Mansour Abbas, Labor leader Merav Michaeli, Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid, National Unity leader MK Benny Gant and Yisrael Beyteneu leader Avigdor Liberman hold a joint press conference in Tel Aviv, on March 16, 2023. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)
From right to left: Ra'am leader Mansour Abbas, Labor leader Merav Michaeli, Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid, National Unity leader MK Benny Gant and Yisrael Beyteneu leader Avigdor Liberman hold a joint press conference in Tel Aviv, on March 16, 2023. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)

Ra’am party leader Mansour Abbas says the judicial system is the “primary protection” for Israel’s Arab minority and that its independence cannot be harmed.

“Arab society is in the minority and to this point, the primary protection for this society has been the judicial system. And thus a reform that hurts the judicial system’s independence, its ability to balance the bulldozing of the Knesset and government, will definitely hurt the standing and rights, and the future of Arab society,” the Islamist party chief says, in Abbas’s most public Hebrew-language remarks on the judicial overhaul.

Abbas, who in 2021 made Ra’am the first independent Arab party to join an Israeli coalition, asks the right-religious government to “sit around a discussion table on the basis of the president’s framework, which is a good and accepted base that’s possible to start from.”

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