The Democrats chairman Yair Golan on Tuesday urged fellow Zionist opposition party leaders to again partner with Ra’am and “stop playing along” with the demonization of the Arab Islamist faction.
“If we must rely on the votes of the Ra’am party to topple this failed government of disaster — the most dangerous to Israel’s security — then Ra’am is a worthy partner,” said Golan, the head of the left-wing party, in a video statement.
He also said publicly declaring Ra’am chief Mansour Abbas a “legitimate partner” would be “the appropriate Zionist response” to Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who said earlier Tuesday that Ra’am’s inclusion in the last government was “a thousand times worse” than the current government’s failure to prevent the Hamas-led onslaught of October 7, 2023.
“The murderous Hamas organization acts out of blind hatred of Jews, and Smotrich, on the other hand, prefers to sacrifice Israel’s security for the sole purpose of not cooperating with Arab society and its representatives,” Golan said.
Accusing Smotrich of forming an “extremists’ pact” with Hamas, Golan said the far-right minister “and his partners in the government were willing to sacrifice” the victims of the onslaught “for the sake of racism… and boundless lust for power.”
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Right-wing former premier Naftali Bennett, the Zionist opposition bloc’s main candidate to unseat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has rejected Ra’am as a potential coalition partner, despite having led the 2021-2022 government that included Ra’am.
Other Zionist opposition leaders have also either explicitly rejected Arab parties as coalition partners or called for a purely Zionist government, which would exclude the Arab parties. Meanwhile, Netanyahu and his supporters regularly equate Arab parties with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.
Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid (L), Yamina leader Naftali Bennett (C) and Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas sign a coalition agreement on June 2, 2021. (Courtesy of Ra’am)
Opinion polls regularly show that the Zionist opposition parties — Golan’s left-leaning Democrats, Bennett and Opposition Leader Yair Lapid’s newly minted Together, hawkish MK Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu and former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party– would fail to secure a majority in parliament on their own. The next elections are set to take place in October at the latest.
Golan, a former IDF deputy chief who served as a deputy economy minister in the 2021-2022 government, said in his video statement that rejecting Ra’am “does not serve our fateful mission: saving Israel and replacing the disaster government.”
Instead, he said, it “plays into the hands of Netanyahu and his partners, who are deliberately dragging us toward national catastrophe and the destruction of the Zionist enterprise.”
“I personally and directly address all my fellow leaders in the liberal democratic bloc: It’s time to stop playing along with the campaign of incitement and de-legitimization, and start acting like a real governing alternative,” said Golan. “It’s time to stop dancing to the tune of Netanyahu’s fiddle.”
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