https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-691784
It’s sad to have to give credit to a member of the Knesset and governing coalition for declaring, in Arabic, that Israel “was born and will remain a Jewish state.”
But the country’s peculiar political reality, in which members of parliament are hostile to that state, requires stretching logic to its limits.
It is thus that I have praised Ra’am (United Arab List) Party leader Mansour Abbas for breaking with the tradition of his Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated peers and former less religious yet equally radical colleagues to place the needs of his constituents above the pernicious aspirations of the anti-Zionist, antisemitic, corrupt Palestinian Authority.
The risk he took by splitting from the Joint (Arab) List bloc and adopting a pragmatic approach has paid off big-time. First, he managed to garner for Ra’am the necessary four mandates to cross the electoral threshold. This led to his being crowned “kingmaker” – the head of the party that ended up tipping the scales to enable the formation of a government after four rounds of inconclusive elections.
Since then, he’s been on a steady roll. No longer a backbencher, he was appointed chairman of the newly created Special Knesset Committee on Arab Affairs. Meanwhile, fellow Ra’am MK Waleed Taha became chairman of the Knesset’s Internal Affairs and Environment Committee on which Ra’am MK Saeed Alharomi had a seat before his death in August.
Abbas has also been successful in his push to increase funding for the Arab sector, plagued by rampant crime and other woes, with a $10 billion allocation included in the recently passed state budget.
ALL OF the above might have been cause for optimism, albeit cautious, if the Ra’am chief hadn’t just picked a virulently anti-Zionist Jewish-Israeli academic to serve as his adviser on unrecognized villages in the Negev. Indeed, if anything casts a shadow on Abbas’s intentions, it’s his selection of Dr. Yeela Raanan for the role.