Ra'am Is Reported Set to Field Its First Jewish Candidate, in Second Place

Yoav Segalovitz, a Yesh Atid member of Knesset and a former senior police officer, is reported to be preparing to run in second place on Mansour Abbas's Ra'am slate at the 27 October election. A meeting is expected once he returns from a holiday in Thailand. If it happens he would be the first Jewish candidate the party has fielded.

Segalovitz served as deputy public security minister in the coalition of 2021 and 2022, the government Ra'am joined and which briefly displaced Benjamin Netanyahu. He built the police unit Lahav 433 for serious crime, and his standing among Arab citizens rests largely on work against violence inside their communities, which is the issue Ra'am has made its own.

The move is a statement of positioning. Ra'am has been an Arab Islamist party; a Jewish candidate at number two is an argument that it intends to be a broad-based one, able to sit in a coalition on terms it negotiates rather than terms it accepts. That is a harder proposition to sell to its own voters than to anyone else.

The other half of the story is what he leaves. Yesh Atid is assembling a joint slate with Naftali Bennett under the Together banner, and a sitting member departing mid-assembly is a signal about how that merger is being received inside the party.