Raam's Abbas adds Zionist ex-police chief Segalovich to party slate

September 5, 2026 at 01:40 PM2 min

This digest was compiled by AI from multiple sources — links to the originals are below.

Raam leader Mansour Abbas announced that former Yesh Atid lawmaker Yoav Segalovich will run second on the party's electoral slate. Segalovich, a Zionist former police major-general, will join the electoral list and parliamentary faction but not become a member of Raam. The move tests whether two distant political identities can share one electoral vehicle.

Key Facts

Yoav Segalovich will run second on Raam's electoral slate but will not become a member of the party.
Segalovich is a former police major-general and served as deputy public security minister in governments led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid.
An August Channel 13 poll suggested a slate including Segalovich could perform somewhat better than Raam has in other surveys.
Segalovich is expected to retain freedom to vote independently on religion and state, security, and LGBTQ rights.

The Abbas-Segalovich Arrangement

Mansour Abbas appeared alongside Yoav Segalovich this week to announce Segalovich would run second on Raam's electoral slate. Segalovich will join the electoral list and parliamentary faction but will not become a member of Raam, leaving the party's constitution and internal decision-making unchanged. He is expected to retain the freedom to vote independently on questions where the ideological distance is obvious, including religion and state, security, and LGBTQ rights. Abbas is not converting Raam into a Zionist party and Segalovich is not becoming an Islamist; they are testing whether two political identities that remain quite far apart can inhabit the same electoral vehicle.

Segalovich's Political Profile

Segalovich is a Zionist former senior police commander whose political biography sits comfortably inside the Israeli mainstream. He retains unusual credibility among Arab local leaders because of his work on organised crime while serving as deputy public security minister in coalition governments led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid. In that period he became one of the few senior Jewish officials associated in Arab public memory not only with promises about crime, but with a governmental programme that actually tried to confront it. That helps Abbas now, when criminal violence remains one of the most immediate concerns of Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Electoral Arithmetic and Strategy

An August Channel 13 poll suggested that a slate including Segalovich could perform somewhat better than Raam has in other surveys. The arithmetic still looks secondary; what Abbas is trying to change is the political value of the seats he expects to win. Since breaking with the Joint List and entering the Bennett-Lapid coalition in 2021, Abbas has pursued a fairly consistent experiment.