Mansour Abbas is betting on a Zionist to make Palestinian votes count

When Raam leader Mansour Abbas appeared alongside former Yesh Atid lawmaker Yoav Segalovich this week and confirmed that Segalovich would run second on the party's electoral slate, much of the immediate attention went to the obvious novelty: An Israeli Jewish politician, openly.

What happened

Jewish participation in political lists representing Palestinian citizens of Israel is not, in itself, unprecedented. Hadash was built around a Jewish-Arab political tradition and has for decades included Jewish candidates and lawmakers. Ofer Cassif sits in the Knesset today as one of its most outspoken Jewish members. What is distinctive regarding the Abbas-Segalovich arrangement is not that a Jew is running with an Arab list. It is the kind of Jewish political voice Abbas has chosen to place there: a Zionist former senior police commander whose political biography sits comfortably inside the Israeli mainstream, not outside it.

The bottom line

For now, mansour Abbas is betting on a Zionist to make Palestinian votes count remains the part of the story worth watching, and further updates are likely as more details are confirmed.