Israeli Press
Likud celebrates as Segalovitz joins Mansour Abbas's Ra'am slate
Image credit: Mansour Abbas, 3 April 2025 — David Shay / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 · License
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Yoav Segalovitz, a former head of the Israeli police investigations and intelligence division who served as a Yesh Atid lawmaker and deputy minister of national security, announced on Monday evening that he will run on the slate of Ra'am, the Islamist party led by Mansour Abbas, in the 27 October election. He is the first Jewish candidate the party has placed on its list.
The Israeli press spent Tuesday reading the move as a gift to Benjamin Netanyahu.
The daily Maariv reported that Likud is treating the pairing as the centrepiece of its closing campaign; its report quoted the commentator Breski, on Radio North 104.5FM, saying that "this campaign competes with and surpasses the draft-law campaign that Likud promotes," and calling the move a large gamble with real potential for Abbas.
Maariv also reported that Segalovitz has scaled his ambition down from the public security portfolio to running a project on crime in Arab towns under whoever holds it.
The party Segalovitz left was cooler still. Tomer Weiner of Yesh Atid told 103FM that his joining "does not make Ra'am legitimate," while insisting his own faction's numbers had steadied.
Ra'am crossed the threshold and entered a governing coalition in 2021, and both blocs have since needed its seats without offering it a place at the table. Weiner's sentence, delivered the morning after the announcement, restates that position ahead of the 8 September deadline for closing the lists.
