Could Arab Voters Decide Israel’s 2026 Election?

What Israel’s Arab citizens say about crime, identity and political integration — and why Mansour Abbas’s unprecedented alliance with Jewish Zionist Yoav Segalovitz could make Ra’am a kingmaker after October 27.

By Suzan Quitaz

AI generated photo of Mansour Abbas and Yoav Segalovitz

When Yoav Segalovitz stood beside Mansour Abbas in Nazareth on August 31 and announced that he would run on Ra’am’s list in Israel’s October election, the symbolism was difficult to miss.

Segalovitz is Jewish, Zionist, a former senior Israel Police commander and until recently a lawmaker with Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid party. Abbas is a conservative Muslim who heads Ra’am, an Arab party rooted in the Southern Branch of Israel’s Islamic Movement. In the deeply polarized world of Israeli politics, such a partnership would once have seemed almost unimaginable.

It is also unprecedented for Ra’am. While the predominantly Arab Hadash party has long included Jewish candidates, Segalovitz will be the first Jewish candidate ever to run on a Ra’am slate, reportedly in the number two position. When the partnership was announced, Segalovitz described himself as “Jewish, Zionist, secular,” a former IDF officer and senior police commander, while Abbas is Arab, Muslim, religious and conservative. What connected them, he argued, was a shared Israeli identity and a belief that cooperation was possible despite those differences. 

More importantly, the partnership could affect who governs Israel.

A Channel 13 poll published on September 3 put the parties supporting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at 53 seats and the Zionist parties opposing him at exactly 53. The predominantly Arab parties held the remaining 14 seats: nine for the reunited Hadash-Ta’al-Balad Joint List and five for Ra’am. The same poll found Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar leading Likud 22 seats to 21. Different polls produce different combinations, but the underlying political problem remains remarkably consistent: neither major bloc can be certain of reaching the 61 seats required to govern without support from somewhere outside its natural camp. 

That raises a question that could become one of the defining issues of the 2026 Israeli election: Will Israel’s Arab citizens simply vote for parliamentary representation, or could their votes determine who becomes Israel’s next prime minister?

Israel’s Arab Voters Could Hold the Balance of Power

Israel will elect its 26th Knesset on October 27, after nearly three years in which the country has faced the consequences of the Hamas-led October 7 massacre and a succession of wars and confrontations in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran. The events since October 7 have transformed Israel’s security environment and reshaped its political landscape.

Against that background, former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot has emerged as Netanyahu’s most serious challenger, with his Yashar party competing with or leading Likud in recent surveys. The former general has campaigned on restoring public trust after October 7, establishing a state commission of inquiry, broadening military and national service and changing the political culture of the Netanyahu era. Recent reporting has also shown Arab governments increasingly taking seriously the possibility that Eisenkot could become Israel’s next prime minister. 

Yet even if Eisenkot finishes first, that does not mean he can form a government. Israel has a proportional parliamentary system, and no party comes close to controlling the 120-seat Knesset alone. Governments depend on coalitions, meaning a party with only four, five or six seats can sometimes determine whether one bloc reaches the crucial 61-seat majority.

This is where the Arab vote becomes so important.

Arab citizens make up roughly 21% of Israel’s population, yet Arab political power has historically been limited both by lower voter turnout and by the reluctance of most Arab parties to participate in Zionist-led coalition governments. Jewish-Arab relations inside Israel are considerably more complicated than the political slogans surrounding the conflict often suggest. As Mideast Journal has previously examined in its overview of Jewish-Arab relations, Jewish and Arab citizens work, study and live alongside one another throughout Israeli society even as deep political, national and religious tensions remain. 

In the 2022 election, Ra’am and Hadash-Ta’al each won five seats, while Balad ran independently and failed to cross Israel’s 3.25% electoral threshold. The configuration is different in 2026. Hadash, Ta’al and Balad have reunited as a Joint List, while Abbas has deliberately kept Ra’am separate. As a recent Jerusalem Post analysis of the two Arab electoral camps explains, the division represents more than electoral tactics. It increasingly reflects two competing ideas about how Arab citizens should engage with the Israeli political system. 

Hadash is socialist and communist-rooted and has historically promoted an Arab-Jewish left-wing framework while remaining strongly non-Zionist. Ahmad Tibi’s Ta’al is a secular Arab-nationalist party; Tibi previously served as an adviser to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Balad is the most explicitly Arab-nationalist of the three and advocates transforming Israel from a Jewish state into what it describes as a “state of all its citizens.”

Ra’am has taken another route. Although it emerged from an Islamist political tradition, Abbas has increasingly concentrated on integration, coalition participation and tangible improvements in the daily lives of Israel’s Arab citizens.

October 27 could test which approach Arab voters believe offers them more influence.

What Israel’s Arab Citizens Actually Say They Want

The most revealing evidence comes not from politicians but from Arab voters themselves.

A major May 2026 study led by Dr. Arik Rudnitzky of Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center found an Arab electorate far more complicated than is often portrayed in either Israeli or international political debate.

The “Integration and Influence: Survey of Arab Citizens in Israel” estimated Arab voter turnout at approximately 53% under the current political configuration. In a hypothetical scenario in which all four major Arab parties recreated the old Joint List, turnout could rise to a record 67%, potentially producing around 16 Knesset seats. That scenario will not occur as things currently stand because Ra’am is running separately, but it illustrates the considerable reserve of political power contained in Arab voter turnout. 

More significant, however, is what those voters say they want done with that power.

Some 77.2% supported an Arab party joining the government after the election, while 63.7% said they believe in Arab-Jewish political partnership. Another 75.8% supported allowing Arab high school graduates to volunteer for a form of national civic service unrelated to security. 

Those numbers complicate the conventional image of Israel’s Arab electorate as politically detached from the state or interested primarily in the Palestinian national struggle.

The survey’s identity findings are equally interesting. Asked which component of their identity was most prominent, 33.3% selected Arab identity, 27.7% Israeli citizenship, 24.5% religious identity and 13.5% Palestinian identity. At the same time, 53.3% described their overall sense of belonging to the state as strong. 

This does not mean the Palestinian issue has disappeared. Nearly half of respondents believed two states based on the 1967 lines remained the only realistic solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Large majorities also viewed an agreement between Israel and Lebanon and normalization with Saudi Arabia positively, but 64.4% said resolving the Palestinian issue should be a prerequisite for such agreements. Arab citizens of Israel can clearly maintain Palestinian, Arab, religious and Israeli elements of identity simultaneously. 

What has changed most dramatically is the hierarchy of their immediate political priorities.

Crime, Not the Palestinian Issue, Tops the Arab Agenda

When respondents were asked to identify the single most important issue facing Arab society, 71.3% chose violence and crime.

Only 8% chose resolving the Palestinian issue. Education, employment and poverty received 7.4%, while planning and construction problems in Arab towns received 6.1%. 

That political reality helps explain the Abbas-Segalovitz alliance.

Israel’s Arab communities are suffering an extraordinary crime epidemic. In 2025, 252 members of Arab society were killed in criminal violence, the highest annual total on record. The crisis has continued into 2026. Following four killings in Nazareth in less than 24 hours, the number of Arab Israeli homicide victims reached 172 by September 4, according to the Abraham Initiatives. The Times of Israel reported on the Nazareth killings and rising 2026 death toll here. 

For many Arab families, therefore, organized crime, illegal weapons and the inability of the police to prevent or solve killings are not abstract political issues. They are immediate questions of personal safety.

Segalovitz brings precisely that issue to the Ra’am ticket. Before entering politics, he commanded the Israel Police Investigations and Intelligence Division and founded the Lahav 433 serious-crime unit. As deputy public security minister in the 2021-2022 Bennett-Lapid government, he was closely involved in government efforts to combat criminal violence in Arab communities. Abbas explicitly cited this record when announcing Segalovitz’s addition to Ra’am. 

Abbas explained the logic in starkly practical terms. Arab families burying sons murdered in criminal violence, he argued, are not interested in the religion of the police officer fighting the criminals. They want somebody capable of doing the job.

That may prove to be a powerful message in communities where funerals have become disturbingly common.

Mansour Abbas’s Integrationist Gamble

Abbas has been moving in this direction for years.

In 2021, Ra’am became the first independent Arab-majority party to join an Israeli governing coalition, providing the parliamentary support that allowed Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid to establish their government. Abbas himself was not a cabinet minister, but Ra’am became an integral coalition partner.

The government subsequently approved major multiyear development programs aimed at addressing socioeconomic gaps in Arab communities, including investments in education, employment, infrastructure, local government and the fight against crime.

But Abbas also crossed a much more politically sensitive threshold. In December 2021, he publicly acknowledged the reality of Israel’s Jewish character, declaring that Israel “was born as a Jewish state” and “will remain” one. The more important question, he argued, was how Arab citizens could integrate into that reality and secure their rights within it.

The statement was extraordinary because it challenged a longstanding taboo within Arab Israeli politics. Rather than making acceptance of Israel’s Jewish character conditional on a final settlement with the Palestinians, Abbas was effectively arguing that Arab citizens should deal with the state as it actually exists and concentrate on improving their position within it.

His position nevertheless remains controversial and at times deliberately ambiguous. Abbas has unequivocally condemned the murder and kidnapping of Israeli civilians on October 7 and has called on Palestinian armed factions to give up their weapons. Yet he has also stopped short when directly challenged to define Hamas itself as a terrorist organization.

That hesitation matters. For Jewish Israelis still traumatized by October 7, it remains one of the principal obstacles to accepting Ra’am as an ordinary coalition partner. Yet Abbas’s broader political trajectory is difficult to ignore. Rather than arguing that Arab citizens should withdraw from Israeli institutions because Israel defines itself as Jewish, he is effectively asking what those citizens can achieve by gaining influence inside those institutions.

Segalovitz appears to be taking the same gamble from the Jewish side. At their Nazareth announcement, he made no attempt to disguise their differences. “I am Jewish, a Zionist, secular,” Segalovitz said, while Abbas is Arab, Muslim, religious and conservative. Yet, he argued, “what connects the two of us is that we are all Israelis.”

The point of the partnership is therefore larger than an electoral maneuver. Abbas is asking Arab voters to accept cooperation with an openly Zionist Jewish politician. Segalovitz, meanwhile, is asking Jewish voters to accept that an Arab, Muslim, Islamist-rooted political party can participate legitimately in governing Israel. Citeturn976399search9 Both propositions remain controversial.

“Abbas Is a Terrorist Sympathizer? Bollocks to That”

I spoke with Israeli lawyer and historian Oron Schwartz, who knows Abbas personally and strongly rejects portrayals of the Ra’am leader as a terrorist sympathizer.

“Bollocks,” Schwartz told me when asked about the accusation.

He describes Abbas instead as representative of a generation of Arab Israelis born in the 1960s and 1970s who carry the historical memory of the Nakba but do not believe Israel is about to disappear or imagine replacing it with a binational state.

“They rightly want to be part of Israel as a respected minority,” Schwartz argued, describing Abbas’s decision to bring a Jewish Zionist onto the ticket as “the right and pragmatic thing to do for the Israeli Arabs who wish to integrate into Israeli society.”

Schwartz acknowledges the enormous impact of October 7 on Jewish attitudes toward Arab political participation and says the suspicions it created cannot simply be wished away. But he argues that Israelis must distinguish between Palestinians in Gaza, Palestinians in the West Bank and Arab citizens of Israel rather than treating them as a single political community.

That distinction may become increasingly important during the election campaign.

Is Ra’am Now a Viable Coalition Partner?

The Abbas-Segalovitz partnership seems designed to answer precisely that question.

Segalovitz does not transform Ra’am into a Zionist party, nor does his presence erase its Islamic Movement roots or Abbas’s political positions. But putting a respected Jewish Zionist, former police commander and former Yesh Atid lawmaker near the top of the slate gives Abbas something he did not possess in 2021: a visible bridge to centrist Jewish voters.

There is evidence that this could matter. More importantly, the latest polling shows why it could matter. The September 3 Channel 13 poll gave Netanyahu’s bloc 53 seats and the anti-Netanyahu Zionist parties 53 seats, with the Joint List and Ra’am holding the remaining 14. Ra’am remained at five seats even after Segalovitz joined, suggesting that his immediate value may not be bringing the party more Arab votes. His more important contribution could be making Ra’am easier for Jewish opposition politicians to accept as a coalition partner. 

That presents Eisenkot and the rest of the anti-Netanyahu camp with a potentially uncomfortable calculation. They can attempt to assemble 61 seats exclusively from Zionist parties—a coalition that current polling suggests may prove extremely difficult—or they can leave open the possibility of cooperation with Abbas.

Doing so carries political risks. Netanyahu and his allies successfully weaponized Ra’am’s participation in the Bennett-Lapid coalition, branding the government as dependent on the Muslim Brotherhood and portraying reliance on Arab votes as illegitimate. A new opposition government dependent on Abbas would undoubtedly face the same attack.

Yet Netanyahu himself explored cooperation with Abbas before the Bennett-Lapid government was formed, illustrating the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the debate: Arab political support becomes unacceptable to many Israeli politicians when their opponents use it, but potentially indispensable when coalition arithmetic requires it. That contradiction may become impossible to avoid after October 27.

The Election Could Test Two Different Futures

Israel’s Arab politics is now offering voters two different models. The Hadash-Ta’al-Balad Joint List remains closer to the traditional Arab political model: emphasizing Palestinian national rights, equality inside Israel and influence primarily through parliament, opposition politics and public pressure.

Abbas is pursuing something that may actually be more radical in Israeli political terms precisely because it is more integrationist. His argument is that Arab citizens should not merely protest government policy or demand equality from outside the coalition. They should accumulate political power, enter governments when possible and use that influence to fight crime, obtain budgets, improve infrastructure and participate directly in shaping the Israeli state.

The survey evidence suggests there is a considerable audience for that approach. Arab Israelis overwhelmingly want the government to confront violence in their communities. Nearly two-thirds say they support Arab-Jewish political partnership. More than three-quarters support an Arab party participating in government. At the same time, the Palestinian issue remains part of their national and political consciousness.

Those positions are not necessarily contradictory. They may instead reflect an Arab Israeli community becoming increasingly comfortable demanding both identities and rights: attachment to its Arab and Palestinian heritage while insisting on a meaningful stake in the Israeli state in which its members live.

And the electoral arithmetic could make that evolution impossible for Jewish politicians to ignore. If the polls remain close, Israel could wake up after October 27 with neither Netanyahu nor Eisenkot able to assemble 61 seats from Jewish and Zionist parties alone. Mansour Abbas could once again find himself holding some of the missing votes.

But this time his ambitions appear larger than simply becoming a parliamentary kingmaker. By placing a Jewish Zionist and former senior police commander beside him, Abbas is trying to persuade both communities that Arab participation in government need not represent a threat to Israel’s identity—and that Jewish-Arab political partnership need not require either side to abandon its own.

Whether Arab voters embrace that argument, and whether Eisenkot, Bennett, Liberman and the broader Jewish electorate are ultimately willing to act on it, could help decide not only Israel’s 2026 election, but the future place of Israel’s two million Arab citizens within the country’s political system.

Suzan Quitaz is a Kurdish-Swedish journalist and researcher specializing in Middle Eastern affairs. She was an Israel-based journalist and presenter for the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs and previously worked as a field producer and journalist for several prominent Qatari media outlets.