Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas says he won’t join joint Arab list

Mansour Abbas, head of the Ra’am party, says he will not run jointly with the other Arab parties in the upcoming elections.

Though earlier this year Abbas indicated that he would likely run with Hadash, Ta’al and Balad, he tells Channel 12 that he will not do so.

The four Arab-majority parties signed an agreement in January committing to work together to revive the joint ticket ahead of this year’s election, but negotiations stalled for months, mainly due to Abbas’s insistence that the bloc be purely technical, to preserve Ra’am’s ability to join a governing coalition, which the other Arab parties oppose.

According to Hadash, the three parties ultimately accepted that demand. A source with knowledge of the negotiations told The Times of Israel that the main obstacle remaining in the talks was Ra’am’s demand that the other parties commit not to oppose or bring down any government that the Islamist party chooses to join.

There is no guarantee that any of the figures running to replace Netanyahu would sit with Ra’am in a coalition, however.

Ra’am joined the Naftali Bennett-Yair Lapid government in 2021, the first Arab party leader to do so in half a century.

Ra’am’s base is among the traditional Bedouin communities in the Negev desert.

For decades, Arab Israeli parties have almost always remained on the outside of the decision-making process in Israeli politics. Jewish parties shunned them as extremists, while they themselves were often skeptical of joining an Israeli government that they deem treats them as second-class citizens and oppresses Palestinians.

Under Abbas, Ra’am blazed a different path, openly working with Benjamin Netanyahu’s previous government.

Recent Zman Yisrael polls have shown both Ra’am and an alliance of Arab parties reaching the necessary 4 seats to enter the Knesset.