Ra’am leader says party will cut ties with religious council, form separate institutions

Ra’am chair Mansour Abbas says his party will separate from the religious council that it is linked to and establish its own institutions, in an interview with Channel 12’s Meet the Press.

Abbas also insists that his party is not a part of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood: “First of all, we are not a part of the Muslim Brotherhood. If we were part of the Muslim Brotherhood, I wouldn’t be in the Knesset, I wouldn’t even be sitting with you here.”

“The second thing is that we have learned lessons from what we had [in the Bennett-Lapid coalition]. Ra’am today is moving in the direction of being a completely civilian party, with separate institutions,” he says.

Pressed if that meant his party would be separating from the Shura Council, Abbas says: “Of course. This is the approach that has been advanced in recent years in Ra’am. Next month we have a conference, and it will approve the changes.”

Currently, the Islamist party is the political wing of the Southern Islamic Movement, a group inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood, a global Islamist organization that has been outlawed in around a dozen countries for alleged links to terrorism.

Abbas has repeatedly denied that his party is connected to the Brotherhood.

Ra’am, which joined the coalition led by prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid in 2021, takes a conciliatory stance toward Israel and is focused more on socioeconomic issues than its parent movement’s more radical sister branch, the Northern Islamic Movement, which is outlawed.

Ra’am holds five seats in the Knesset, and polls indicate it will likely retain that number in the next elections.