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 announced 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 Zionist and a former police major-general, running near the top of the list of a conservative Islamist Arab party. That combination is unusual, and it was meant to look unusual.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 about 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.Segalovich is joining Raam’s slate, not Raam itself, and the difference is easy to miss if one stops at the phot...