Perhaps the most surprising and welcome development in Israeli politics this year is the conservative Islamic party Ra’am’s declaration that it would sit in a governing coalition, either with Likud or with Likud’s opponents—something no Arab party has ever done in Israel’s history. Dan Diker and Khaled Abu Toameh argue that this move is not a fleeting bit of political opportunism, but the culmination of a years-long effort by the party’s leader—the dentist-turned-parliamentarian Mansour Abbas—to change the nature of Arab politics in the Jewish state:
Abbas’s campaign [in the last election] avoided incendiary default statements on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that had characterized the Israeli Arab political leadership’s rhetoric for decades, including the recent April 2021 swearing-in of Knesset members. Instead of pledging allegiance to Israel, MKs from the Arab Joint List, [from which Ra’am recently broke off], used the platform to condemn Israel as an “apartheid, racist, occupation state.”
Abbas’s successful campaign responded to growing frustration in the Israeli Arab community. Since 2007, the Israeli Arab middle class has grown significantly. Israel’s nearly two million Arab citizens have increasingly sought economic and political integration, with 63 percent of Israeli Arabs supporting Arab parties joining an Israeli coalition government. . . . Ra’am succeeded in attracting a wide electoral base, including young people, Christians, secular Muslims, and Bedouin.
Notably, the nationalist Likud faction won more votes in the Arab sector in the 2021 elections than the left-wing Meretz and Labor factions combined. . . . Two polls in early 2020 indicated a growing Israeli-Arab identity as opposed to a Palestinian-Arab identity that had more commonly characterized Arab citizens of Israel. In parallel, the 2020 coronavirus pandemic emphasized the equality between Jews and non-Jewish citizens [and] a sense of unity during a national crisis.
All this, note Diker and Abu Toameh, is taking place during Jerusalem’s normalization with several Arab states, leading to a slow disintegration in the Arab world of the taboo against open cooperation with Israel. And that, in turn, could have an effect on the Palestinians:
The Palestinian Authority’s anti-Israel policies, particularly its boycott of the $50 billion investment program as part of the Abraham Accords 2019 economic workshop in Manama, Bahrain, contrasted sharply with Arab normalization with Israel and growing Israeli Arab normalization within Israeli politics. . . . The Palestinian Authority’s arrest, detention, and mistreatment of Palestinian participants at Bahrain’s 2019 “Peace to Prosperity” workshop prompted defiant responses by some in the Palestinian private sector.
While largely unnoticed in Western policy circles, Palestinian-Israeli normalization and economic cooperation have [also] taken root. Since 2005, normalization between Palestinians and Israelis in Area C of the West Bank has flourished in fifteen industrial and commercial zones, providing a career path to some 40,000 West Bank Palestinians who work together with Israelis under identical conditions and receive the benefits and protections of Israeli labor and social-security laws.
Read more on Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs: https://jcpa.org/article/mansour-abbas-mahmoud-abbas-and-the-abraham-effect/