The alliance that breaks down the Iron Wall: former IDF officer Segalovitz and Islamist Abbas

Tel Aviv. “This is an effort to save the country.” This is how Yoav Segalovitz describes the deeper meaning behind the boldest move of this Israeli election campaign, in which he is a key figure. In this interview with Il Foglio, from his home in central Tel Aviv, the former police commissioner—whose career has been dedicated to combating white-collar crime—explains the significance of his decision to stand as the number two candidate for Mansour Abbas’s Islamic Ra’am party. Talk about an unlikely pair: two figures who could not be further apart. On the one hand, Segalovitz: a former senior police official, a former IDF officer, founder of Unit 433 – Israel’s equivalent of the FBI – a secular Zionist and former deputy minister for Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid party. He was among those who brought former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former President Katzav to justice, and investigated Avigdor Liberman, with whom he served in government in 2021. On the other hand, Abbas: a dentist and imam who recognises the Jewish identity of the State of Israel as a de facto reality and focuses on asserting the rights of Arab society, understanding that the best way to do so is to stop watching the game from the opposition benches. He does so as leader of Ra’am, the political wing of the Islamic Movement in Southern Israel – an organisation that many liken to the modus operandi of the Muslim Brotherhood, which made history in 2021 by supporting the Bennett-Lapid government and now aims to do so again. A far more complex gamble in post-7 October Israel.

The complexity of the situation became apparent this week when the Central Elections Committee disqualified Ra’am and the United Arab List, as well as MPs Ofer Cassif and Sami Abu Shehadeh, effectively excluding all the main Arab parties from the race. This is nothing new: over the last twenty years, the committee – a political body – has disqualified several parties in every election, but the Supreme Court has always overturned these decisions, with one exception in 2019 when only the disqualification of the far-right MP Michael Ben Ari was upheld, on grounds of incitement to racism. In this case too, as confirmed by Segalovitz’s team, it is taken for granted that the Court – which is due to rule in the coming days – will overturn the decision regarding Ra’am, the United List and Cassif; whilst the case of Abu Shehadeh – the only one also supported by the Attorney General’s Office, concerning an article published on 7 October 2023 interpreted as supporting the armed struggle against Israel – appears more likely to be upheld, following the precedent set by the Ben Ari case.

Speaking with Segalovitz, aged 67, one gets the impression that he is sacrificing himself for an experiment that goes far beyond the potential five seats that the polls attribute to this alliance. “We cannot move forward unless 21 per cent of society feels fully part of Israeli institutions. This action is a necessary step in keeping with the spirit of the Declaration of Independence on which the state was founded in 1948. And this alliance holds enormous potential for economic, cultural and social growth, not to mention the fact that Israel’s Arabs represent a bridge to the Arab world,” says Segalovitz, speaking of an alliance that reflects the spirit of the Abraham Accords, which have seen Israel integrate more fully into the Middle Eastern region over the past six years, despite the countless war fronts still active. The bottom line: alongside the normalisation of relations in the Middle East, there is an urgent need for Israel to normalise coexistence between Jews and Muslims within the country.

“Following 7 October 2023, the most brutal massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, an atavistic fear has re-emerged within Israeli society,” says Segalovitz. “But we need rationality and leadership, and this step is a move towards breaking down the barriers of fear. Especially as this is not a fear with deep-rooted foundations, as our daily lives demonstrate, where we see cooperation between Jews and Muslims in all sectors of society: we are together at the chemist’s, at university, in restaurants, at the bank, in hospitals. Someone facing an operation doesn’t ask the surgeon whether they identify with the Muslim Brotherhood; they look for the best one. The only place where this isn’t the case is in politics, because that is where polarisation is fuelled.” His objectives, Segalovitz maintains, are “strategic rather than political: we cannot live in this region without a strong connection to our Arab society. Part of my mission is to break down the wall of fear within Jewish society, and I can do so precisely because I represent the mainstream of Israeli society: a patriot, a Jew, a Zionist, a security services officer, a secularist, and a defector from a centrist party. Mansour is a conservative Arab leader. We are different, but we are all Israelis.”

Data from the Israel Democracy Institute, which tracks the sentiments of 21 per cent of the country’s population divided between Israeli and Palestinian identities, supports this view. The trend towards ‘Israelisation’ – that is, the proportion of people who ‘feel part of the State of Israel and its problems’, as the question is phrased – is rising steadily and has seen an unexpected increase even after 7 October. Today it stands at around 60 per cent, compared with 48 per cent in June 2023; with a peak of 70 per cent recorded in the months following the Hamas attack. Three out of four support Arab youth contributing to the state through forms of non-military civil service (they are currently exempt from both). And above all – given that Abbas has done his homework well in recent months, a fact that sees him securing 5 seats in the polls on his own, compared with the 7 held by three other Arab parties opposed to this policy – 77 per cent support the inclusion of an Arab party in the government following the elections.

In the Jewish state, where the most popular name for newborns, according to the latest census, is still Mohammad, there are no alternatives, and Segalovitz faces reality head-on, unlike those who think they can look the other way. “Major changes often stem from personal initiatives, which is why I haven’t brought a group with me. I’m taking this risk. But there’s no chance we won’t succeed.” By “succeed”, he means, at best, this party’s entry into the future government expected to emerge from the 27 October election. In the current seat distribution, the polls confirm a deadlock in which no political party manages to reach the minimum threshold of 61 seats; for this reason, 4 or 5 seats are critical, a deciding factor that could determine who will govern. However, in post-7 October Israel, even the current opposition – largely made up of Abbas’s former allies in the 2021 Bennett-Lapid ‘government of change’ – is reluctant to discuss a coalition that depends on an alliance with Muslim parties, and there are those who view Segalovitz’s inclusion on the list as a fig leaf designed to facilitate this option. Others argue that the former commissioner, aware that he would not find a secure position with Lapid – who is in freefall in the polls – has secured one for himself so that, when the time is right, he can switch sides and secure a majority for Eizenkot, leaving his new allies behind. He rejects this accusation and guarantees that, should any future government fail to guarantee entry for the entire Ra’am list, he will not change sides and will remain in opposition alongside his Muslim counterparts. In any case, for Segalovitz, this is merely the beginning of a journey that he sees as a priority for the next twenty years, and which will not be limited to the upcoming parliamentary term alone.

The collaboration between Segalovitz and the Arab organisation did not begin today. In 2013, he left the police force, joined Yesh Atid and was elected in 2019. As a Member of Parliament, he immediately began to address the concerns of this sector of Israel’s diverse society, following an invitation to a conference in Kfar Qassem on the scourge of crime. “At that juncture, I realised a paradox: in the mainstream debate, the hot topic was the need to abolish the Basic Law on Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. There I realised that this is not the priority issue for Arab society, which is instead entirely focused on the issue of rampant crime. I began travelling around Arab towns and villages, studying the problem in depth.” The people and local officials were eager for collaboration, he says, and particularly with someone with a ‘security’ background like his own.

The alliance’s concrete programme is, in fact, centred on the issue that most mobilises Arab voters: organised crime, which, since the start of 2026 alone, has claimed 173 victims in Arab society, mainly due to feuds between criminal gangs, according to the NGO Abraham Initiatives. Segalovitz’s plan aims first and foremost to dismantle the economic resources of organised crime by tackling the black market and the misappropriation of public contracts, even though the phenomenon is much broader in scope and hampered by a widespread culture of silence. During his year as Deputy Minister for Internal Security in the Bennett-Lapid government, there was a 16 per cent fall in homicides within the Arab community – the first such decline since 2014.

Netanyahu “Abu Yair”, who in 2021 was on the verge of an alliance with Mansour Abbas himself – in what would truly have represented, a hundred years on, the realisation of the vision set out by the ideologue of Revisionist Zionism, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, in his text “The Iron Wall” – is now focusing his campaign on delegitimising the Ra’am leader as a secret member of the Muslim Brotherhood. How does the secular Segalovitz view this? Brotherhood or not, we are still talking about an Islamic party which, until last month – when it adopted a reform paving the way for the Jewish candidate’s entry – was influenced in its decisions by the will of the Islamic Shura Council. “We tend to treat all Muslims as a monolith, but just as among Jews, there are many differences. And I’ll go further: even if that were the case? They are still a minority, and as long as Israel can maintain its definition as a Jewish and democratic state, this issue is irrelevant,” he states, arguing that “today’s Likud has strayed from the Jabotinsky vision; it has lost its bearings.”

Even when it comes to the thorniest issues, such as the dispute over the Temple Mount/Temple Mount Esplanade, or prospects for resolving the conflict with the Palestinians, Segalovitz sidesteps the issue. “In our daily lives, the issue of the Palestinian territories accounts for just 5 per cent of public debate. The pressing issues, even within Arab society, are crime, education, welfare and employment. We are not in the midst of negotiations with the Ramallah Authority to create a Palestinian state; there is no discussion of dividing Jerusalem. It is likely that when we reach those moments, we will see things differently from Mansour. But we are not there yet.” This remains the major Achilles’ heel that makes the majority of the Jewish electorate sceptical. “If this move drives the extremists so mad, whilst at the same time giving hope to people of sound judgement, I feel I have made the right decision. We are offering a paradigm shift,” says Segalovitz in response to the criticism and the support, which, he claims, also comes from figures within the security services. “I am aware of the complexity, but I see a huge shift in the willingness of Arabs to integrate into Israeli society, even after 7 October, so to claim that it is impossible to establish a partnership with the Arab parties is false. The political system uses fear to unite people; we, on the other hand, want to offer hope.” A hundred years on, the time has come to open a crack in the iron wall.