Last week, after a question of parliamentary procedure sparked fierce debate in the Knesset, something unusual happened: the parliamentarian who chaired the vote in question—a member of the Joint Arab List—broke ranks with the opposition and declared that his Likud opponents were right. Since then, the dissenting MK, Mansour Abbas, has been the target of outrage from his fellow member of the Joint List, and much attention from the Israeli Arab media. Haviv Rettig Gur suggests that Mansour Abbas might be the harbinger of a new kind of Arab politics, less tied to the Palestinian cause, less dogmatically anti-Zionist, and more interested in improving the day-to-day lives of its constituents:

If there is to be a resolution to the conflict between the Jewish state and a putative Palestinian one, writes Jonathan Michanie, it won’t start with drawing lines on maps or restrictions on where Jews can build houses, but with the Palestinian Authority (PA) abandoning its official anti-Semitism. The PA can, in this regard, learn much from those Arab nations that have recently made peace with Israel: