JERUSALEM – After a fourth Israeli election in two years appears to have ended in another stalemate, leaving many Israelis feeling trapped in an endless cycle, there was at least one surprising result on Wednesday: an Arab political party emerged as a potential creator of kings.
Even more surprising, the party was Raam, an Islamic group with roots in the same religious movement as Hamas, the militant group that runs the Gaza Strip. For years, Raam was rarely interested in working with the Israeli leadership and, like most Arab parties, was ostracized by his Jewish colleagues.
But according to the latest vote count, Raam’s five seats maintain the balance of power between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc and the heterogeneous party alliance that seeks to end its 12 years in power. The vote count is not yet final, and Raam previously suggested that he would support only an outside government.
Still, even the possibility that Raam could play a decisive role in forming a coalition government is stirring Israel. An independent Arab party has never been part of an Israeli government before, although some Arab lawmakers supported Yitzhak Rabin’s government from outside in the 1990s.
Suddenly in a position of influence, Raam promised to support any group that offers something suitable in exchange for Israel’s Arab minority, which is a descendant of the Palestinians who remained after Israel’s creation in 1948 and who today make up about 20% of the population.
“I hope to become a key man,” Mansour Abbas, the party’s leader, said in a television interview on Wednesday. In the past, he added, traditional parties “excluded us and we excluded ourselves. Today, Raam is at least challenging the political system. It is to say: ‘Friends, we exist here’ ”.
The party is not “in anyone’s pocket,” he added. “I am not excluding anyone, but if someone excludes us, it is clear that we will exclude him.”
Either way, it would be a strange partnership.
If Raam supported Netanyahu’s opponents, he would probably need to work with a right-wing opposition leader, Avigdor Liberman, who described some Arab citizens as traitors and asked them to leave the country.
If he supported the Netanyahu-led bloc, Raam would be working with a prime minister who enacted legislation that lowered the status of the Arabic language and said that only Jews had the right to determine the nature of the Israeli state. In a previous election, Netanyahu warned of high Arab participation as a threat to encourage his own supporters to vote.
Raam would also be cooperating with an alliance that includes far-right politicians who want to expel Arab citizens from Israel who they consider “disloyal” to the Israeli state. One of these politicians, Itamar Ben Gvir, until recently hung in his home a photo of a Jewish extremist who murdered 29 Palestinian Muslims in a West Bank mosque in 1994.
But Abbas is prepared to consider these possible associations because he believes that it is the only way for Arab citizens to guarantee government support in the fight against the central problems that plague the Arab community – gang violence, poverty and restrictions on access to housing, permission land and planning.
In the past, “Arab politicians have been spectators of the political process in Israel,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in February. Today, he added, “the Arabs are looking for a real role in Israeli politics.”
The change would mark the culmination of a gradual process in which Arab parties and voters became increasingly involved in the electoral process.
Raam, a Hebrew acronym for United Arab List, is affiliated with a branch of an Islamic movement that has not participated in Israeli elections for years. Raam was founded in 1996 after some members of that movement voted by a narrow margin to run for Parliament, an event that split the movement in two. The other branch, which Israel banned and whose leader arrested, does not participate in the elections.
Raam later joined the Joint List, a larger Arab political alliance that has emerged as the third largest party in the three recent Israeli elections, in a sign of the growing political influence of the Arab minority.
Recognizing this growing importance of Arab voters, Netanyahu asked for a lot of support during the recent election campaign.
Analysts had long predicted that an Arab party would end up working in or alongside the government. But few thought that an Arab party would agree to work with the Israeli right. Few even imagined that the party would be a conservative Islamic group like Raam.
The party split from the Joint List in March, frustrated by how little its parliamentary presence meant without executive power, and declared itself ready to join a government of any color that promised political rewards to Arab citizens.
On Wednesday, that bet seemed to have paid off. Asked whether Netanyahu would consider a government backed by Abbas, Tzachi Hanegbi, a government minister, said that if a right-wing government of Zionist parties were impossible to assemble, his party would consider “options that are currently undesirable, but perhaps better than a fifth. election. ”
Raam’s newfound relevance constitutes “a historic moment,” said Basha’er Fahoum-Jayoussi, co-chairman of Abraham Initiatives, a non-governmental group that promotes equality between Arabs and Jews. “The Arab vote is not only being legitimized, but the Arab-Palestinian community in Israel is being recognized as a political power with the ability to play an active and influential role in the political arena.”
The news was also received with joy in the Negev desert, where dozens of Arab villages are threatened with demolition because they were built without authorization.
“The possibility that Abbas could pressure the government to recognize our villages arouses emotions of optimism,” said Khalil Alamour, 55, a lawyer whose village lacks basic infrastructure like power lines and sewage because it was built without Israeli planning permission.
Within Netanyahu’s party, there is considerable disagreement over the idea of relying on Abbas. Some members fear working with – and being rescued by – a group that is ideologically opposed, for example, to military operations in the occupied territories.
The government should not be “dependent on a radical Muslim party,” said Danny Danon, president of Likud Worldwide, the international arm of Netanyahu’s party. “We shouldn’t be in that position.”
In the opposition bloc, there is also concern about the prospect of an alliance. Some of its right-wing members have already vetoed working with Arab lawmakers during an earlier round of negotiations last year. And Raam’s social positions – who voted against a law banning gay conversion therapy – are at odds with the view of left-wing opposition parties like Meretz.
“It will be very challenging, no matter how you look at it,” said Ms. Fahoum-Jayoussi. “When the problem is decisive, it is still difficult to see whether Mansour Abbas’s approach is real and that he can move on.”
And some Palestinian citizens of Israel are highly skeptical of Raam’s approach. Ayman Odeh, the leader of the Joint List, accused Abbas of agreeing to a relationship with the Israeli state that frames Arabs as subjects who can be bribed, rather than citizens with equal rights.
“Mansour Abbas is able to accept that,” Odeh said in an interview before the election. “But I’m not going.”
Irit Pazner Garshowitz and Gabby Sobelman contributed to the report.