Politics & Diplomacy
Segalovitz quits the Knesset as Ra'am weighs its first Jewish candidate
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Yoav Segalovitz handed his resignation letter to the Knesset speaker on Sunday, ending seven years as a Yesh Atid member of parliament and setting up the strangest move of Israel's election season: a Jewish former police commander running on the slate of Mansour Abbas's Ra'am.
Ynet's political correspondent Amir Ettinger reported the resignation, which takes effect immediately. His seat passes to the next name on Yesh Atid's list for the remainder of the term.
Segalovitz, who served as deputy national security minister in the Bennett–Lapid government, is reported to be heading for the second slot on Ra'am's list, and to be the party's preferred candidate for national security minister should it enter a coalition after the 27 October vote. He has neither confirmed the move nor denied it.
Abbas puts the decision behind his primaries#
Mansour Abbas is not letting the story run ahead of his party. A decision on slate placements will be taken only after Ra'am's primaries on 22 August, the Ra'am leader said, and he dismissed reports that the party would change its name to accommodate a Jewish candidate — in Hebrew or in Arabic.
Ra'am's own machinery is moving nonetheless. Alongside the Segalovitz talks, former officials and security figures from the Jewish public have approached Abbas, the Maariv correspondent Mohammad Majadleh reported, and the party is weighing a broad remake of its list against a tight calendar.
Why this matters to Palestinian readers#
The arithmetic of 27 October has not changed: neither bloc reaches 61 seats without the Arab parties both spent years delegitimising, and Ra'am sits at the centre of that paradox.
What a Segalovitz candidacy would test is whether the Israeli public will accept the arrangement when it is offered in its most reassuring form. So far the answer is no. In the Maariv–Lazar survey published on 7 August, 55 percent of Israelis opposed bringing Ra'am into the next government even with Segalovitz on its slate.
There is a second reading inside Palestinian society in Israel, where organised crime kills scores of people a year and the police record on it is the community's most bitter grievance. Putting a former senior police commander on an Arab party's list makes that file the campaign's argument — a promise of results that Abbas's opponents in Hadash-Ta'al answer with the charge that partnership has bought little.
The right is reshuffling too#
The realignment is not confined to one side. Gilad Erdan and Yuli Edelstein launched their still-unnamed party in Tel Aviv on Thursday, breaking with Likud after decades in it.
Erdan told the radio station 103FM on Sunday that he had turned down a reserved slot on Likud's list, that his own research showed a potential of ten seats, and that further mergers and changes would come before the lists close.
The polling is not yet with him. Zman Yisrael's survey last week gave the venture five seats; another put it below the 3.25 percent threshold entirely. Times of Palestine's election watch continues in both languages through election night.
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