JERUSALEM: A former Israeli police official will run on the election list of the moderate Islamist party Raam in upcoming polls, its leader announced Monday, making him the first Jewish Israeli to stand for an explicitly Arab party.
Mansour Abbas, the head of Raam, said his party would be running on an anti-crime platform in the October 27 election, and had chosen to do so “with the man who led this fight with us and proved himself in it: Yoav Segalovitz.”
Segalovitz until recently served as a member of the Knesset with centrist Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party, having entered the legislature in 2019.
He had previously been deputy minister of national security in a broad coalition government led by Lapid and right-winger Naftali Bennett.
In 2021, Abbas had signed an unprecedented accord to join that coalition, which brought together parties from the left, right and center.
