A Jewish former deputy minister joins Ra’am while Netanyahu’s own slate becomes a police file

At a press conference in Nazareth on Monday evening, Ra’am chairman Mansour Abbas and Yoav Segalovitz — a former police official, former MK and former deputy minister — announced that Segalovitz will run on Ra’am’s list on 27 October. AFP, carried by Arab News, called him the first Jewish Israeli to stand for an explicitly Arab party; the Times of Israel added the necessary qualifier that the predominantly Arab Hadash has long included a Jewish lawmaker, so the claim holds only for an explicitly Arab or Islamist list. Abbas said Ra’am would run on an anti-crime platform. Arab News quoted Segalovitz acknowledging “there is a difficult history between Arabs and Jews,” though the snippet available breaks mid-quote. The two had met on 26 August to promote a joint run, i24 reported. Channel 12’s 3 August poll put the Zionist opposition at 56 and the Netanyahu bloc at 50, with Ra’am and Hadash-Ta’al on five each — an anti-Netanyahu Zionist bloc of 60, one short.

The other Monday-night item ran inside Likud. The party announced on the evening of 30 August that Innovation, Science and Technology Minister Gila Gamliel had fallen to 35th on the slate after a recount, outside any realistic slot, with MK Eti Atiya taking 25th, a place reserved for female representation. Arutz Sheva reported the demotion as arriving “amid serious allegations of voting irregularities.” Gamliel had filed a police complaint on 26 August alleging irregularities at two polling stations in Be’er Yaakov and saying her representative was denied entry to the recount that changed the result, according to Haaretz. On voting day, 17 August, MK Tally Gotliv posted on X: “Attention Likud voters! There are polling stations with fake ballots without my name!! ... A polling station with a fake ballot will be disqualified.” Three of eight reserved slots went to Gideon Sa’ar, Haim Katz and newcomer Oren Dobronsky, with a ninth created for Israel Katz.

Assessment: The 7 September deadline is doing the work here. Abbas is not being courted on the merits of Ra’am’s anti-crime platform; he is being courted because a bloc stuck at 60 seats across four months of Channel 12 and Kan projections cannot cross the line without Arab lists, and Segalovitz is the visible price of making that mathematically respectable to Zionist voters. Distrust the seat numbers themselves: none of the polls in the available material published sample sizes or margins. And note the asymmetry of scrutiny — a Likud recount now sitting with the police has drawn a fraction of the coverage given to one Jewish candidate joining an Islamist list.