Ra’am chairman MK Mansour Abbas said opposition leaders Naftali Bennett, Gadi Eisenkot and Avigdor Liberman are all fit to serve as prime minister and said he is confident he will eventually reach agreements with them on joining a future coalition, even as those same figures have distanced themselves from cooperation with his Arab-majority Islamist party.
Who Gets to Decide
Abbas spoke to the press ahead of a faction meeting and said, “I think they are all worthy and have the experience to lead the next government,” while declining to endorse a specific candidate. He also said, “I worked with the leaders of the opposition parties. They are responsible and statesmanlike and know how to work together,” adding that “in the end, we will reach agreements.” The language is all coalition choreography and elite reassurance, with ordinary people left to watch the same narrow circle of political managers negotiate over who gets to sit at the top of the apparatus.
His comments came despite all three opposition figures distancing themselves from cooperation with Abbas’s Arab-majority Islamist party. Bennett and Liberman ruled out sitting with Ra’am, and Eisenkot also indicated he does not view the faction as a viable coalition partner. Abbas, meanwhile, kept talking in the language of future deals and practical arrangements, even as the door was being shut in his face by the very people he was praising.
The Limits of the Game
Opinion polls have consistently shown that the Zionist opposition bloc — including Bennett and Opposition Leader Yair Lapid’s Together slate, Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu, and Eisenkot’s Yashar party — would likely struggle to form a coalition without Ra’am. That leaves the whole exercise looking less like principle and more like arithmetic: a scramble for enough seats, enough leverage, enough permission from the system to assemble a government.
Ra’am became the first Arab-majority party in decades to join a governing coalition when it entered the Bennett-Lapid government in 2021, a move Abbas praised as “a model that can be developed, improved, and upgraded.” The phrase sounds like a pitch for reform inside a structure that still forces marginalized communities to bargain for access rather than power. The coalition itself is presented as a model, but the model is still built on exclusion, negotiation, and the constant need to prove usefulness to the dominant political order.
Fractured Bloc, Familiar Pressure
Addressing ongoing efforts to unite the four Arab-majority parties ahead of the next election, Abbas said negotiations are continuing but acknowledged there are still “a variety of issues on which we have no agreement.” The Islamist Ra’am, communist-majority Hadash, secularist Ta’al and nationalist Balad signed an agreement in January to explore running together, amid public pressure to reunite the fractured Arab political bloc and strengthen its influence. More than four months later, little tangible progress has been made.
That stalled process shows the pressure-cooker logic of electoral politics: public pressure to unite, internal disagreement over strategy, and a system that rewards coalition math over durable collective power. The parties are pushed to merge, split, and repackage themselves in order to survive inside a structure they do not control.
Abbas said the main sticking point remains his insistence that any joint slate function only as a technical alliance that would dissolve after the election, preserving the party’s ability to independently join a future coalition. “We want to bring practical solutions to Arab citizens, and therefore we cannot commit to a policy of excluding ourselves from [sitting with] Zionist parties,” he said.
That is the bargain on offer: temporary unity for the ballot box, then a return to separate bargaining with the same political class. Abbas’s own words make clear that the goal is not to break from the system but to keep a seat at its table, even when the table is set by parties that have already ruled out sitting with him.