Ra’am chairman Mansour Abbas announced Monday that Yoav Segalovitz, a Jewish former police official and deputy minister, will run with his historically Arab and Islamist party in the October 27 election.
The announcement capped weeks of speculation that Segalovitz would take the unprecedented step of joining with Ra’am, and while he will run with the party in the election in a technical bloc, he will not officially become a member of Ra’am in order to retain freedom of action after the election.
According to Abbas, Ra’am’s top priority is to eliminate violence against innocent civilians amid a years-long wave of violent crime in Israel’s Arab community. Speaking at a press conference in Nazareth, Abbas asserted that every Arab parent goes to sleep asking themselves, “Will my children return home safely?”
The only way to accomplish that goal is to create partnerships and “to see the other as a human being, not as an enemy,” he continued, praising Segalovitz as “an officer who has stood up to criminals his whole life without asking what their religion is” and “an honest, quiet man who doesn’t seek headlines.”
Segalovitz established the police’s Lahav 433 unit to fight serious crime and is a former commander of the police’s Investigations and Intelligence Division. He was credited with helping to reduce crime in Arab Israeli communities during his tenure as deputy minister for public security in the 2021-22 government headed by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid.
