Ra’am’s Abbas, former MK Segalovitz confirm ongoing talks on Knesset run

By Sam Sokol 13 August 2026, 1:58 pm

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Sam Sokol is a former political correspondent at The Times of Israel. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"

MK Yoav Segalovitz attends a Constitution, Law and Justice Committee meeting at the Knesset on October 20, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Ra’am chairman Mansour Abbas and former Yesh Atid MK Yoav Segalovitz confirm that they are holding discussions regarding the Jewish politician’s potential membership in the Islamist party.

In a joint statement, the pair announce that they “met today and discussed in a good and positive spirit the possibility of Segalovitz joining the Ra’am slate in the upcoming Knesset election” on October 27 and that they “agreed to continue direct contacts in order to advance the matter.”

A former senior police officer, Segalovitz has been credited with helping reduce crime in Arab Israeli communities during his tenure as deputy minister for public security in the previous government headed by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid. He submitted his resignation letter to Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana on Sunday, and announced his exit from Yesh Atid several days before that.

Rumors of his contacts with Abbas have been circulating for weeks, with a recent television poll showing that if he joined Ra’am, it would pick up two more seats, going from five to an unprecedented seven.

The move has the potential of boosting Abbas’s legitimacy as a coalition partner in the eyes of opposition parties, some of which are opposed to a potential government that includes Arab-majority factions.

Ra’am was part of the coalition during the previous government headed by Bennett and Lapid, though Bennett now rejects it as a coalition partner, saying that following the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, invasion and massacre, Israel’s coalition should not depend on a non-Zionist party.

Abbas has repeatedly condemned the October 7 atrocities and also recognized Israel as a Jewish state. And Ra’am has taken steps to shed its Islamist image, with Abbas stating in December that the party will separate from the religious council that it is linked to and establish its own institutions.

Responding to the announcement, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit party claims that Abbas “is attempting, through Yoav Segalovitz, to gain control over the National Security Ministry” in order to ease conditions for detained terrorists, halt demolitions of Arab homes in the Negev and turn the Negev and Galilee into “Islamic territory.”