Until a few days ago, the leadership of the Ra’am political party was opposed to uniting with the three other major Arab factions to form a single slate in upcoming Knesset elections.

Ra’am, a conservative religious party, had united with the communist-led Hadash, the secular-nationalist Ta’al, and the anti-Zionist Balad in 2015 as a strategic response to the threshold for entering the Knesset being raised to 3.25 percent of the vote, more than the parties typically garnered on their own.

The move injected newfound enthusiasm for electoral politics into the Arab street, and the unified slate garnered enough support — 13 seats — to become the third-largest party in the 120-member Knesset.

Unlike the other three parties, though, Ra’am wanted to use that power for something other than sitting in the opposition, and eventually split off to seek a seat at the government table, which it found when joining the Naftali Bennett-Yair Lapid coalition in 2021-22.

Now, as the four parties representing a fractious mix of ideologies again pursue unification, Ra’am’s reluctance stems from that same tension.

For Ra’am’s leaders, despite all the benefits that may come with forming a united political force, doing so will make it more difficult to run an independent campaign calling for integration into a governing coalition – any coalition, including one led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud.

Mansour Abbas, who heads Ra’am, is focused on building influential political power that will change the reality for Israel’s Arab minority, and is willing to sit with the right-wing Likud to get it done, even if it means swallowing countless insults.

He rejects the idea of Arab parties supporting a government from the opposition, as some centrists have proposed, insisting that he must be a full member of the government if he hopes to bring beneficial change for his constituency.

Ra’am ran on its own in 2021 (winning four seats) and 2022 (winning five seats, the same number as Hadash and Ta’al’s joint list. (Balad, which also ran alone in 2022, fell below the threshold.) When Israelis head to the polls again, in October at the latest, Abbas believes Ra’am could grow to six seats, and until recently, the party had even been scouting for a Jewish candidate to join its slate and broaden its appeal.

Ra’am, it seems, would be the last party to even entertain getting the Joint List gang back together again.

But everything changed on Thursday.

With a crime wave that claimed 252 lives in the Arab community in 2025 not only persisting but seemingly growing, tens of thousands of protesters turned out in the northern city of Sakhnin to demand that those in power take action, and Arab businesses nationwide held strikes to protest the violence.

The powerful show of collective action helped heap pressure on the four........

© The Times of Israel