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The political partnership Israel needs
Jewish and Arab citizens work together every day, in hospitals, universities, businesses and public institutions. Politics has been different, but this may be changing too
Something unusual happened in Israeli politics last week. Yoav Segalovitz, a former senior police commander, former deputy minister of public security and, until recently, a Knesset member for the centrist Yesh Atid party, announced that he would run in the coming election as number two on the list of Ra’am, the Arab Islamist party led by Mansour Abbas.
There are obvious political calculations involved. Israel is heading towards an election. Ra’am has an interest in strengthening its legitimacy among Jewish voters and political parties. Segalovitz wants to continue his public career and his work against organized crime and violence in Arab society.
All of the above is important. Still, something of a much bigger magnitude has happened here.
Segalovitz and Abbas have done something that remains extremely rare in Israeli politics. They have decided that their considerable political, national, religious and ideological differences do not make political partnership impossible.
Segalovitz was quite explicit about those differences when announcing his decision: “I am Jewish, a Zionist, secular, an officer in the IDF and a commissioner in the Israel Police,” he said. “Mansour is Arab, a religious Muslim and a conservative.” He then said: “What connects the two of us is that we are all Israelis, and that is our shared identity.”
Segalovitz has not changed his identity or his beliefs, and neither has Abbas. Segalovitz made that clear too: “I do not intend to change Mansour or Ra’am, and they will not change me.” Political cooperation, he argued, can be based on trust, recognition of differences and a commitment to working together.
This may sound straightforward. In Israeli politics, it is anything but. Jewish and Arab citizens work together every day. In hospitals, universities, businesses and public institutions, this is an ordinary part of Israeli life. Yet when it comes to politics, the rules change. Palestinian citizens of Israel make up around a fifth of the population, but their political representatives are still routinely treated as suspect partners in governing the country.
They are expected to integrate into Israeli society, contribute to it and take responsibility for it, while their participation in national political decision-making continues to be regarded by many as beyond the bounds of legitimate politics.
“I want to break the paradigm of the dividing lines and the lines of discourse,” Segalovitz said. “I also want to break the paradigm of how political partnership is created.”
This is what I find important about his decision. He has crossed a boundary that has become deeply entrenched in Israeli politics, between what is considered Jewish politics and what is considered Arab politics.
Mansour Abbas has crossed a boundary too. Ra’am is an Arab party rooted in the Islamic Movement. Bringing a Jewish, Zionist, secular former senior police officer into the second place on its Knesset list is not exactly an obvious decision for Abbas and his constituency.
Abbas explained his reasoning simply: “I have learned one thing in recent years: to bring about change, you need partnership.”
That deserves attention. For many years, the discussion about Jewish-Arab political partnership has largely been about whether Jewish parties are prepared to include Arab parties in a governing coalition. That still leaves the basic division intact: Jewish politics on one side, Arab politics on the other, followed by negotiations about whether and under what conditions the two can cooperate. Abbas and Segalovitz are trying something different.
I am writing this as the co-director of The Abraham Initiatives, a non-partisan organization that has worked for decades to advance equality and a shared society for Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel. My support for this move should not be understood as support for Ra’am or for any other political party.
I also have disagreements with Ra’am. I believe that a party representing Palestinian citizens of Israel should demand more than budgets, services and improvements in material conditions. It should address the interests and status of Palestinian citizens as a national minority, and it should use its political power to advance an end to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.
These disagreements are not an argument against political partnership. A serious partnership has to be able to contain them. Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel do not need to agree about history, identity, Zionism, religion or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before they can share responsibility for the country in which they live. If agreement on all of those questions is the entry price, partnership will never happen.
There is also a history to Segalovitz’s decision that I know personally. In 2019, The Abraham Initiatives organized a conference in Kafr Qasim on violence and crime in Arab society. At the time, the issue was still far from the place it occupies today on Israel’s public agenda. Mansour Abbas and Yoav Segalovitz, then relatively new to parliamentary politics, were both among the participants.
Segalovitz has spoken more than once about the effect that discussion had on him. After a long career in the police, he was confronted there with the scale of the crisis facing Arab communities. It became a major focus of his political work.
Later, as deputy public security minister in the Bennett-Lapid government, he coordinated the government’s campaign against crime in Arab society. He brought professional knowledge of the police and law-enforcement system, but something else as well: he treated the killing of Arab citizens as a problem for the State of Israel, rather than as an internal problem of Arab society.
It is also part of the reason why I do not see his decision to run with Abbas as an electoral stunt. There is a line connecting that encounter in Kafr Qasim, his subsequent work with Arab communities and their political representatives, and the decision he has made now.
Political partnership is rarely created by declarations about coexistence. It grows when people work together on real problems, encounter one another’s realities and develop enough trust to share responsibility without asking the other side to become something it is not.
What began for Segalovitz with confronting the devastating reality of crime in Arab communities has now led him to challenge one of the most persistent boundaries in Israeli politics. Abbas, from his side, has chosen to challenge that boundary too.
Israel desperately needs more of this.
Amnon Be’eri-Sulitzeanu is co-CEO of The Abraham Initiatives
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