The Arab-Israeli Power Broker in the Knesset

Is Mansour Abbas changing the system or selling out the Palestinian cause?
portrait Mansour Abbas
In a fiercely divided country, Abbas has gained influence by playing to the center.Illustration by Yonatan Popper

There’s a saying in Arabic about learning from hard experience: “Burn your tongue on soup and you’ll blow on yogurt.” Mansour Abbas, an Arab-Israeli legislator, has had his share of tongue burns, and he has learned to be cautious. In public appearances, he makes sure to keep the Israeli flag in view; last year, he spoke stirringly on Holocaust Remembrance Day. But, as the head of an Islamist party with connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, he remains an object of suspicion for many Jewish Israelis. At least four of his colleagues in the Knesset, the country’s parliament, have called him a “supporter of terror.” When Ayelet Shaked, a member of his coalition, recently saw him in a narrow corridor there, she walked right past, as he stood by, offering a soft “Shalom.”

Things are nearly as bad on the opposing side. The Palestinian press regularly describes Abbas as a traitor. One veteran negotiator suggested that his ascent in the Knesset had created a “Vichy government.” His offense, in their view, is an insufficient commitment to the long fight for Palestinian statehood. In the West Bank, 2.3 million people live under Israeli occupation; another two million are blockaded in Gaza. But Abbas focusses instead on improving conditions for the Palestinian citizens of Israel proper, a population of nearly two million that has sustained decades of discrimination and neglect. (The traditional term for this group, Arab Israelis, is increasingly controversial, but it’s the one that Abbas prefers.) In March, when Abbas attended a protest against the Israeli police in the Arab town of Umm al-Fahm, two of his fellow-protesters punched him in the head. Although he is deeply devout, he has stopped attending sermons at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, for fear of his safety. “For him, that’s like not going home,” his brother told me.

So when, in April, Abbas and two advisers sat in a small room at their party’s headquarters to draft his first major national speech, the debate was largely about what he wouldn’t say. The speech, only two hours away, was to be transmitted live from a hotel in Nazareth. On Channel 12, a correspondent announced the broadcast as if it were an unexpected matchup in the World Cup: “All television channels are cutting away from their scheduled programming to carry the speech of an Arab politician—a dramatic change.”

Abbas slumped behind a laptop, as Aaed Kayal, his party’s chief campaign strategist, read aloud from his phone. The window behind them was shuttered, filtering out the early-evening haze. A television crew from the investigative show “Hamakor” filmed the exchange.

“It’s time to create a reality that will make us, the Arab citizens of Israel, a peace bridge between the two peoples,” Kayal read monotonically. “A bridge of peace,” Abbas corrected him, his voice no more than a whisper. Abbas is forty-seven, with droopy eyes, a barely existent tuft of gray hair, and a plump face, set into a determinedly benign smile. He is of average height and above-average weight. (“He’s on cafeteria food—a lot of coffee and candy,” a friend told me.)

His second adviser, Ibrahim Hijazi, piped up, “A bridge of peace that would bring an end to the—”

Kayal, anticipating the word “occupation,” interrupted. “No, no,” he said. “That would take us to a problematic place.” Later, he explained his reasoning to me: “You want to market your car as fast? Say that it’s fast. You want to market yourself as pragmatic? Be pragmatic all the way.”

The goal of this pragmatic approach was to help Abbas lead his party into a ruling coalition—something that no Arab-Israeli politician had ever done. Nine days earlier, the country had endured its fourth election cycle in two years. Once again, the results had been inconclusive, as Benjamin Netanyahu, the longtime Prime Minister, was unable to secure enough support for his right-wing bloc. But, amid the uncertainty, a quirk of parliamentary politics made Abbas an unlikely power broker.

In Israeli elections, the leader of the party with the most support in parliament has first shot at forming a government and becoming Prime Minister. Because Israel has a multiparty system, the winner has to enlist—beg, cajole, outright buy—the backing of the smaller parties, in order to fill out a coalition. Arab parties have historically rejected the prospect of serving in an Israeli government. (Not that they were asked.) But now Netanyahu was suggesting that he was open to working with Arab interests—just as Abbas indicated that his party was willing to work with Netanyahu. Such a deal would keep Netanyahu in charge. It would also give Arab Israelis, and Abbas, an unprecedented degree of influence.

Netanyahu had a divisive record with Israeli Arabs, who constitute twenty-one per cent of the population. As Prime Minister, he incited rage against them whenever it seemed politically expedient, but he also passed the largest-ever economic package to benefit their community. The result, Aziz Haidar, a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told me, was “the most social segregation and the most economic integration.” Abbas chose to focus on the integration. Perhaps Netanyahu—politically effective, inseparable from his base, solicitous of the most religious sectors of society—was not such a bad model for an ambitious Islamist to follow. When I met with Abbas recently, he spoke of forthrightly emulating Netanyahu’s party: “Our policy is copied and pasted from Likud.”

As Abbas huddled with his advisers over the draft of his speech, he knew that any mention of “occupation” would be fraught. Even if Netanyahu was willing to overlook the word, using it would immediately disqualify Abbas on the extreme right. Yet, as the leader of an Arab party, he couldn’t simply ignore the Palestinian issue. Could he? His two advisers seemed almost to personify the voices arguing in his head: the results-minded Israeli pol and the Palestinian ideologue. (When I told Abbas this, he laughed and said, “It’s true.”)

Hijazi, the ideologue, turned to him: “Mansour, what do you have to say?”

Kayal pleaded, “Two peoples! We just agreed!”

Although Abbas is devout, he has stopped attending sermons at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, for fear of his safety. “For him, that’s like not going home,” his brother said.Photograph by Michal Chelbin for The New Yorker

Abbas nodded his head ever so slightly at Kayal. The strategist won. “Occupation” was out.

The art of appeasing entrenched factions is part of Abbas’s birthright. He grew up in Maghar, a mountainside township in the Galilee where three-fifths of the residents are Druze, one-fifth are Christians, and one-fifth are Muslims. “I’ve always been a minority within a minority,” he said. When I visited, Abbas’s father, Ghazi, greeted me from behind the counter of his grocery store, where he has worked for sixty years. The place, which abuts the family home, is a gathering spot for locals to gossip, talk politics, and air their conflicts.

Ghazi, who is eighty-four and barely speaks Hebrew, said that his views reflected the assimilative nature of Maghar. In the nineteen-eighties, he sat on the local council on behalf of the Arab Communist Party, which was then prominent among Arab Israelis. Later, he supported the peace-seeking government of Yitzhak Rabin. Throughout, he served as an unofficial arbiter for the town’s Muslim population—“a sulha man,” or peacemaker, Mansour told me. Some of Mansour’s earliest memories are of people flocking to the store to seek his father’s help with reconciliation. “He’s the best psychologist I know,” Mansour’s younger brother Osama, a lecturer at Sakhnin College, told me.

Mansour was born in 1974, the fifth of eleven children. (Ghazi maintained that he was the third, but Osama clarified that he had counted only the boys.) A shy, portly, well-mannered boy, he excelled at school, though he was a bit of a clown. His father wanted him to go into medicine, a common trajectory for promising Arab students in Israel. (Forty-six per cent of those who received a medical license last year were Arabs.) But, when Abbas was sixteen, he “discovered the mosque,” he recalled. His upbringing had been “religious lite”—observant but not strict. Now he threw himself into nightly study of the Quran, learning its more than six thousand verses by heart. Within a year, he had become an imam at a mosque near his house.

Word of his accomplishments reached an erudite and charismatic sheikh, who invited Abbas to join a weekly discussion group of Islamic and political theory. Some boys had fast legs or big hearts, the sheikh liked to say, but “Mansour is a head.”

The sheikh, Abdullah Nimar Darwish, called himself “a soldier of peace,” though his focus on peace came late. In 1971, he had founded the Islamic Movement in Israel, an ideological offshoot of the global Muslim Brotherhood; he also formed a terrorist cell that torched Israeli farmers’ fields and orchards. While serving three years in prison, he underwent a transformation. Darwish died in 2017, but his daughter, Nosiba, described his reckoning to me. One day, behind bars, he asked himself, “What have we accomplished with armed resistance?”

After his release, in 1984, Darwish began advocating nonviolence and preaching a more tolerant interpretation of Islam. One sura of the Quran became his guiding metaphor. It tells the story of Yunus, who is swallowed by a whale and survives because of his piousness. Darwish believed that Arab Israelis, too, had to find a way to exist in “batn al hut”—“the belly of the whale.” Nosiba explained, “We have to live in our homes in a country to which we belonged from the beginning, that is now the State of Israel. So we will take all of our rights, we will do the maximum for our community, and we will not break the law.”

In 1993, the Oslo Accord secured a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Islamic Movement splintered. The leaders of its northern branch continued to shun Israeli politics, arguing that the Jewish state had no right to exist. (They were later charged with aiding Hamas and eventually outlawed, by Netanyahu’s security cabinet.) By contrast, the southern branch, led by Darwish, came to see political engagement as Arab Israelis’ only tool against entrenched inequality. In 1996, he helped form a political arm of the movement, a party called the United Arab List, or Ra’am.

At the time, Abbas was at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, studying dentistry—a concession to his father, and also to financial necessity. (Arab functionaries still refer to him as “al doctor.”) Yet political activism monopolized his time. He co-founded a student council representing the Islamic Movement. Rather than focus on pan-Palestinian causes, he addressed local issues of discrimination, such as a lack of dormitory housing for Arab students. “He even got all the Christians to vote for him,” one insider told me.

Privately, Abbas struggled to reconcile this ecumenical approach with religious strictures. Abdelkarim Azzam, a university friend who now serves as Abbas’s assistant, told me, “Once, we had an event, and Mansour and I went to the sheikh and asked, ‘Is it O.K. for a woman who’s secular in her appearance to host?’ ” Darwish, he recalled, laughed and said, “What’s the problem?” He reassured Abbas by telling stories of pious figures whose relatives were nonbelievers; the son of Nuh, he pointed out, refused to accept God’s prophecy and come aboard the ark. “His point was that you change people by dialogue, by mind and heart, not by coercion,” Azzam said.

This moved Abbas deeply. “When you try to change someone, you threaten them,” he told me, one afternoon in his office. “Why should they change? But when you say, ‘Let’s talk, let’s try to reach an understanding, come get to know me and my history and my hardships and my narrative, and I will do the same’—then both sides will change. This isn’t some mystical belief. I see it daily.”

In 2010, Abbas was appointed deputy head of the Islamic Movement. He pushed to hold democratic elections every four years, and to open the ranks to more women. While helping to lead the movement, he also enrolled in a master’s program in political science at the University of Haifa. Doron Navot, his thesis adviser, recalled hours of conversation, in which Abbas deployed the Quran to demolish the ideologies of groups like the Islamic State: “Here it says explicitly that you can’t abuse hostages, and here they are executing a pilot.”

Abbas still serves as an imam at a mosque outside Tiberias, where his Friday sermons regularly attract some two hundred worshippers. A recent sermon dealt with finding temperamentally suitable partners for one’s children. The Quran, Abbas noted, stresses the importance of like-mindedness: “He has created spouses for yourselves from your own selves, so you might take comfort in them.”

Abbas’s own search for a suitable partner began when he was twenty-nine. One day, he confided to a senior figure in the Islamic Movement that he was looking for a wife. The man asked to meet Abbas’s parents, and soon afterward he arrived in Maghar with his wife and daughter in tow. The daughter, Yakoot, was sixteen, a year shy of legal marrying age. Abbas took one look at her and decided that he would be pleased to wait if he had to. “At least, that’s what he says now,” Yakoot told me recently, and chuckled. She was less impressed, in part because of their age difference. “I said, ‘No, no, no’ until the very end,” Yakoot said.

We were sitting on cream-colored sofas, in the living room of the couple’s house, a few steps down the hill from where Abbas’s parents live. A sign outside, in Hebrew and Arabic, announced the “Dentistry of Dr. Mansour Abbas.” Yakoot, now thirty-four, was dressed in a loose-fitting gray dress and a black hijab, balancing their eighteen-month-old daughter on her lap. She teaches English at the local high school, and has been raising their three children increasingly alone since Abbas entered parliament. Yakoot thought she was marrying a dentist, she said: “We didn’t talk politics at all. Now we joke—I tell him he never said that’s what he wanted. And he says, ‘But, when you agreed, you agreed to everything.’ ”

In 2018, Abbas was elected to lead Ra’am, which had entered a coalition of predominantly Arab parties called the Joint List. He was uneasy about the alliance. The Joint List parties, though ideologically disparate, were united in their support for Palestinian rights and their resistance to Israeli occupation. Abbas, by contrast, was focussed on aiding Arab Israelis, whose towns and villages, he said, were “becoming refugee camps.” At times, this meant acting against the interests of Palestinians in the West Bank or in Gaza. When a proposal was raised this summer to grant Israeli work visas to fifteen thousand Palestinian construction workers, Abbas argued that this would harm the livelihood of Arab-Israeli laborers.

Ayman Odeh, the leader of the Joint List, suspected that Abbas meant to lead his party out of the alliance and into Netanyahu’s government, exchanging ideology for influence. In fact, Abbas was hoping to do just that, though he didn’t say so in public; the prospect seemed too outlandish. Under Netanyahu, Israel had passed a string of laws that discriminated against the Arab population. One, from 2018, enshrined Israel as the nation-state of the Jews while disregarding its non-Jewish citizens. But, Abbas told me, “I always thought, How can we influence a society where seventy per cent belong to the right, whether moderate or extreme? You can’t influence it from the fringe. So let’s position ourselves kind of in the middle.”

These days, when the Knesset is in session, Abbas comes home only after his Friday sermons, if he comes home at all. Though he rents an apartment in Jerusalem, most nights he crashes on a sofa in his office. In the Knesset, he chairs two committees, dedicated to the Arab sector and to issues of crime and violence, and acts as deputy speaker. Away from parliament, the demands of his constituents might take him, in a typical week, from a tour of demolished Bedouin homes to an understaffed hospital in Nazareth, from the tiny northern village of Jatt to a funeral tent in the southern Negev (which he visited, to his chagrin, during his daughter’s thirteenth-birthday party).

With her husband mostly gone, Yakoot has taken up audiobooks in English, distracting herself with titles such as “The Billionaire’s Accidental Wife.” She has also taught herself Japanese, using an app on her phone. In her living room, she was describing her passion for “everything Japanese” when a knock came at the door. Yakoot excused herself, then returned and explained that the visitor had been one of the many strangers who appear seeking her husband’s help. He was from Kabul, an Arab town in the north. Thankfully, she added, his visit was unrelated to the spate of killings there, which had preoccupied Abbas for months.

Last August, a skirmish broke out between teen-agers in Kabul, and it soon grew into a clash between two rival families, both prominent in the town. The violence dragged on into the fall, leaving a member of each family dead and many more injured. Kabul, a town of fourteen thousand, was cut in two, as residents erected a mound of rocks between the opposing families’ domains. With fires raging and masked men shooting out of car windows, Abbas began to visit, hoping to negotiate a peace.

In recent years, Kabul has fallen prey to organized crime. The problem is endemic in Arab municipalities. A hundred Arab Israelis have been killed this year, representing more than seventy per cent of all murders in the country. Of those, the police have solved only about twenty per cent, compared with more than fifty per cent in the Jewish community. The term #ArabLivesMatter has begun trending on Twitter. “We have lost control over the street in Arab communities,” a senior law-enforcement official acknowledged to Haaretz. (When six Palestinians escaped from an Israeli prison in September, a grim joke made the rounds: “If they want to not get caught, they should commit a murder in Arab society.”)

The increase in crime, officials say, reflects a breakdown in trust between Arab citizens and the police, which began in 2000, when the police fatally shot thirteen Arab protesters. Since then, the state has effectively “stepped out of the Arab space,” Kamal Ryan, an Islamic Movement official who heads an anti-violence organization, told me. Instead, the police have redoubled their efforts in Jewish cities. In 2003, the government of Ariel Sharon orchestrated a crackdown, which ended with the leaders of Jewish crime families either under arrest or fleeing the country. But the crime didn’t stop; it simply moved. The families’ foot soldiers—most of them Arab youths—have taken over, transplanting operations from Jewish cities to Arab or mixed towns.

Ryan estimates that sixty thousand Arab men now work for the mob, from drug dealers to loan sharks and collectors of protection money. The effects are not limited to the margins of society. Arab citizens seeking mortgages are often turned away by banks, and many young couples resort to the black market. Netanyahu’s program to improve conditions in Arab communities was supposed to address such disparities, with three billion dollars in spending over five years. But local councils lacked the infrastructure to administer the money, and almost half the funding allocated to them went unspent. The councils have instead become a lucrative target for organized crime. Last year, fifteen Arab council heads were targeted by gunfire or Molotov cocktails.

Abbas has made the “eradication” of crime and violence in Arab communities his signature issue. He serves as a member of an unofficial nationwide sulha committee, and has brokered dozens of reconciliations between rival families. In recent years, Ryan said, he has become the “dominant person in resolving most of the heavy conflicts and murders” in Arab society. A source close to Abbas told me that Israeli police officials have personally asked him to intervene in several of the bloodiest feuds.

“Hey, how come our names aren’t on the plaque?”
Cartoon by Robert Leighton

Yet some critics say that the Islamic Movement, with its emphasis on religious law, is not a tempering force but a complicit one. The movement “creates this isolationist rhetoric that allows the State of Israel to turn its back on its Arab citizens by saying, ‘They’re different,’ and by giving local councils the power to run the lives of Israeli Arabs,” Raef Zreik, a scholar of political philosophy, said. “If tomorrow someone beats me to a pulp, the State of Israel will not intervene. It will say, ‘We have subcontractors in the local councils.’ ”

For Abbas, the work is gruelling: endless visits with grieving relatives who are more interested in vengeance than in reconciliation. Kayal, the strategist, recalled phoning him once in the middle of the night and hearing what sounded like a firing range in the background. “Where are you?” he asked. “Kabul,” Abbas replied. But, after four months of visits there, Abbas oversaw a breakthrough. On a clear day in January, five hundred men filed into the town hall for a reconciliation ceremony. A long piece of white cloth and a wooden pole were carried in. The head of each family tied a single knot of cloth to the pole, to symbolize their unshakable bond. Abbas, from the stage, issued a prayer in a soft voice. “We need the sulha to become a road map for Arab society,” he said. “May Kabul remain a place of love.”

Before the latest election, in March, Abbas removed his party from the Joint List. He cited ideological disagreements, centered on the alliance’s endorsement of gay rights, but he later acknowledged that this was just a pretext—“a catalyst.” Abbas has been starkly consistent in his support for anti-L.G.B.T.Q. legislation, voting in favor of conversion therapy and against adoption rights for same-sex couples.

The Joint List, outraged, worked to portray him as a shill for Netanyahu, and the strategy seemed to work. Analysts predicted that voters would abandon Abbas’s party. But Kayal believed that the polls were misleading. “People were embarrassed to say they were voting for Mansour—like those Trump voters,” he said. (Analogies to Trump come readily to Kayal, who regards the disgraced political operative Roger Stone as a lodestar.)

In the end, Ra’am won four seats in parliament, while the Joint List lost nine of its fifteen. The media had missed a shift in Arab-Israeli society, Mohammad Magadli, an analyst for Israel’s Channel 12, told me. “There’s a young generation here that is no longer afraid of the State of Israel,” he said. “It’s a brash generation that isn’t willing to be second-class citizens. But it’s also a generation that wants to integrate into society, so they vote for Mansour Abbas.”

Abbas’s campaign posters had featured a three-word message: “Realistic. Conservative. Influencing.” After the election, he gave a speech in which he signalled his openness to negotiating with anyone who offered his party a place in government. His opponents were not impressed. “Mansour Abbas’s speech tries to present as a ‘cuddly Teddy bear’ someone who belongs to the Islamic Movement, supports Hamas, and sanctifies murderers of babies,” a Knesset member named Itamar Ben Gvir proclaimed. Ben Gvir is one of the hard-right ideologues whom Abbas had sought to pacify; he has been convicted eight times, on charges that include incitement and supporting a Jewish terrorist group. (The two men have neighboring offices in the Knesset. Anhar Hijazi, a hijab-wearing adviser to Abbas, told me, with a wink, “Every day, I walk up and down the corridor just so that he knows I’m there.”)

Without the support of the far right, Netanyahu’s effort to form a coalition with Abbas collapsed. But the attempt to bring Ra’am into government had a significant effect, Abbas said: “It made the move kosher.” Now Yair Lapid, the centrist leader of the second-largest party, had twenty-eight days to assemble his own coalition. He had been discussing a power-sharing deal with Naftali Bennett, a kippah-wearing former settlement leader and software millionaire, who would serve the first two years as Prime Minister. Together, they picked up where Netanyahu had left off: Lapid phoned Abbas.

In early May, the three men met at a hotel outside Tel Aviv, about fifteen minutes from where Lapid and Bennett live and a two-hour schlep for Abbas. Bennett was in shirtsleeves; Lapid had on his habitual T-shirt and blazer; Abbas wore a suit. Over orange juice and croissants, Abbas laid out a demand that would have seemed preposterous a few months before: he would join the coalition if the government supplied almost ten billion dollars for housing, education, welfare, and transportation in Arab communities, with separate funding for the Druze and Bedouin populations and nearly a billion dollars to target crime and violence.

The group, aware that Abbas was still screening calls from Netanyahu, broadly agreed to his terms. Bennett wrote on Facebook, “I’m willing to go far and pay a price with my ‘base.’ ” Then they hit an impasse, around the issue of housing for Arab Israelis. Since Israel’s founding, in 1948, the state has failed to build a single Arab settlement, while adding more than seven hundred Jewish communities. Abbas, who won overwhelming support among Israel’s three hundred thousand Bedouins, asked that lawful status be conferred on nine Bedouin villages. And he insisted on cancelling a law that allows the police to demolish unauthorized homes. To build a home in Israel requires a permit—but, because the central government has not supplied many Arab councils with the necessary surveys, securing one can take years, driving families to build illegally. According to estimates, there are at least fifty thousand unauthorized homes in Arab communities. All are under threat of being razed. “This, for us, is a nightmare—a trauma,” Abbas has said.

Bennett, who once warned that Arab Israelis “should not test our patience,” refused to overturn the law. The meeting adjourned, with another one scheduled for after the weekend. Both sides later characterized the subsequent meeting, in typical tight-lipped coalitionspeak, as “good.” But, among Abbas’s constituents, tensions over housing were growing worse.

The impetus was a pending court decision, which was expected to expel six Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem. Abbas wanted to visit the families, but they rebuffed him, as a neighborhood committee condemned his “anti-national stance.” Fearing unrest, the police had cordoned off the plaza outside Al-Aqsa Mosque. The decision, coinciding with the holy month of Ramadan, was seen as denying Muslims a place to congregate. Clashes broke out between Palestinian protesters and the police. Some protesters threw stones. The police, wielding tear gas and stun grenades, raided the mosque.

Abbas watched from home, as images of the holy site, filled with smoke, appeared onscreen. “The picture drives people beside themselves,” he told me. “It fell on a foundation that was ready for a conflagration.” On Sunday, Hamas issued an ultimatum for Israel to withdraw its forces from Al-Aqsa by 6 p.m. When Israel did not yield, the group fired a barrage of rockets at Jerusalem. That night, Israel launched an offensive that devastated Gaza, claiming the lives of more than two hundred Palestinians, at least sixty-seven of whom were children. Rocket fire killed twelve Israelis, including two children. The conflict spilled into the streets of Israel, and to the mixed towns, where a quarter of Israel’s Arab citizens live, resulting in some of the worst ethnic violence since the country’s founding. Places such as Haifa, Jaffa, Acre—fast-gentrifying tourist havens, where Jews and Arabs had lived in relative peace—became sites of attempted lynchings. In Lod, a week of nightly clashes left the city full of charred buildings and broken glass. Even Abbas struggled to maintain his assurance that dialogue would ease the tensions between Arabs and Jews. He later acknowledged, “We all failed there.”

A week after the riots broke out, Abbas arrived at Lod’s Grand Mosque. The parking lot stood vacant, apart from the torched shells of three cars. While adjusting an earpiece for a television interview, Abbas was approached by Yair Revivo, the city’s mayor. Revivo, a former campaign chief for Likud, was known for offending his Arab constituents. (“Call me racist until tomorrow, but Jewish criminals have a drop of compassion,” he once said. “Arab criminals have no restraint.”)

Revivo told Abbas that he had an opportunity to call for an end to the violence. “There’s a synagogue that was burned a hundred metres from here,” he said. “You’ll look like a man if you come.” Abbas quickly decided to join him.

The resulting footage, of the two men side by side in the synagogue, inspired a frenzy in the Jewish and Arab media. (It was less often reported that Abbas had stopped Revivo from placing a kippah on his head.) For many on the right, the gesture set Abbas apart from other Arab politicians. “When an Arab leader condemns violence and the torching of a synagogue, in full throat, not defensively, then I have to reach out to the hand that is extended to me,” Yoaz Hendel, Israel’s communications minister, told me. Among Arab Israelis, however, reactions ranged from shock to fury. Some of Abbas’s staunchest allies turned against him. Ibrahim Hijazi, the secretary-general of the Islamic Movement, called it an “inappropriate, mistaken visit.” A poll released the following week declared, “Ra’am is wiped out.”

Amid the escalating violence, coalition talks had broken down. But, a source close to Abbas told me, Abbas and Lapid quietly continued to negotiate, with Bennett’s blessing. In the end, they compromised. The government would recognize three of the nine Bedouin villages; the law that legalizes razing would remain in effect, but would be “frozen” until the end of 2024.

Two hours before Lapid’s mandate was set to expire, on June 2nd, the three men, looking tired but relieved, signed the terms of the new government. As Lapid announced that he had formed a coalition, cheers and applause broke out in the room. Abbas, however, was not in a celebratory mood. The previous weeks had rattled him. “It turns out that, even if you try to ignore the national issues, you won’t be able to,” he told “Hamakor.” “The conflict is still present. Alive. Hot. Kicking.”

If the riots had exposed the limits of Abbas’s domestic agenda, he responded by committing to it more deeply. He complained that people kept trying to look past his conciliatory approach to find a secret ideology. “This is our ideology,” he said. “This isn’t just ‘civic.’ We’re talking about a matter of life and death. It’s bigger than nationality or religiosity or ideology.”

In November, the government will hold a final vote on the proposed budget, including the billions of dollars in funding that Abbas secured from his coalition partners for Arab-Israeli concerns. Netanyahu has blasted the money as the “Abbas tax”—“mas Abbas,” in the resonant Hebrew. But activists say that the package could transform the future of Arab citizens: curbing unemployment and school-dropout rates, improving integration into Israel’s booming high-tech sector, and expanding housing and public transportation. If it passes—as seems likely—Abbas will have achieved a historic victory. He will also (in his eyes, at least) be vindicated for the compromises he made along the way.

During the summer, he toured local councils to discuss where that money will be directed. His spokesman doubles as chauffeur; Abbas rides shotgun. It’s a lean operation. When the coalition agreement was announced, in June, Abbas wasn’t given a swanky ministry, the customary reward for coalition-party leaders. He claims that he didn’t want one, in order to leave a buffer between him and the government in case of a new Gaza offensive. His aides mentioned another reason, one afternoon after he’d left the room. Being a minister entails having a large security detail, supplied by Shin Bet. “That embarrassed him,” Azzam, his assistant, said. “It’s perceived as truly being part of the establishment.”

The perception of Abbas as a sellout persists. One morning, I met with Amir Badran, a lawyer who represents Arab families facing eviction in Jaffa. Abbas’s efforts on housing ought to appeal to such a person, but Badran was indignant: “Are you there to fix my pavement? Take care of my plumbing? That’s what my vote is worth?”

Other critics focus on his roots in the Islamic Movement. Zreik, the political-philosophy scholar, has argued that Abbas represents “politically flexible pragmatism mixed with religious ideological conservatism.” This religious prism “turns a conflict of geography and history into a cultural conflict,” he told me. “He blames people like me for hating Jews, saying, ‘We are all sons of Abraham and need to love one another.’ That was never the issue! The issue is that there is a people sitting on the land of another people and refusing its right to self-determination. Once you take space, territory, land out of the conversation and take out the national question of self-determination, you’re left with a cultural misunderstanding. And then what do you do? You hold meetings to better understand one another.”

Even Abbas’s supporters concede that he can seem out of touch. When I asked Osama Abbas about his brother’s near-refusal to raise the Palestinian issue, he deliberated for a moment and finally allowed, “It’s difficult.” Ryan, of the Islamic Movement, said of Abbas, “He is a visionary. But sometimes he comes across as naïve or as an ahbal”—a fool.

The Jewish press does not see Abbas as such a guileless figure. Photographs recently surfaced from 2013, showing him visiting the relatives of convicted Palestinian terrorists. He justified these visits by saying that the families had asked for assistance, and that, as a social movement, Ra’am “has to be there.” Haaretz later reported on a private meeting that Abbas held in Doha, in 2014, with the Hamas chief Khaled Mashal, and on another, in 2016, with the head of Hamas’s military operations. Abbas explained that the meetings were part of a peace initiative led by an Orthodox rabbi in Israel. This claim aroused skepticism, but the rabbi, Michael Melchior, confirmed it to me, noting that Abbas had safeguarded Israeli interests in the face of extremist views. “I found him to be a true man of peace,” Melchior said.

After Abbas entered the government, a senior Hamas member accused him of “giving cover to a dish that poisoned the victory of our people.” But Abbas is careful not to criticize Hamas. One afternoon, when we were discussing Islamophobia, he mentioned “terrorist groups that have charred the face of Islam in the world.”

Cartoon by Emily Bernstein

“Including Hamas?” I asked.

“No,” he replied instantly. “I’m talking generally, about groups like Daesh”—the Arabic term for the Islamic State—“that have a universal dimension. Hamas is a local group that deals with a local national struggle.”

He seemed to regard the Taliban’s recent takeover of Afghanistan along similar lines: a somewhat understandable, if not fully justified, local resistance. “It looks like this development happened in coördination” with the Americans, he said, and then added a quick disclaimer: “I’m not for or against it.”

One morning in August, Abbas’s S.U.V. pulled up to the cinder-block town hall of Ma’ale Iron, a council of five Arab villages in Israel’s Wadi Ara region. Inside, people were lining up to collect their mail, and some stopped to embrace him. In the latest election, seventy per cent of local residents voted for Ra’am. One man, who had canvassed for the Party, explained his support with an aphorism: “Whoever marries my mother, I call him father.” Asked to elaborate, he offered another. “You have to be close to the plate, or else you don’t get anything.”

Mahmoud Jabarin, the local council head, welcomed Abbas to his office. A photograph of Netanyahu, faded to ochre, hung on a wall. Jabarin told the council’s head of security, “Mansour Abbas is useful to us now.” Turning to Abbas, he said, “I care a great deal about Palestine and the West Bank, like every national-minded person. But, at the end of the day, we live here, and we need a lot of things.”

The group walked to a conference room, where a dozen men and one woman sat around a table laden with figs and grapes. The wadi stretched outside the window.

“Here we call you the acting Prime Minister!” the council’s financial manager told Abbas, in Hebrew.

“Let’s respect the Prime Minister,” Abbas replied, woodenly.

“But even Netanyahu called you that!” another man chimed in, to uneasy laughter.

Two weeks earlier, on the floor of the Knesset, Netanyahu had said that the proposed budget was “meant to satisfy one man, and one man alone: Mansour Abbas, the real Prime Minister!” Abbas, whose demeanor in parliament usually oscillates between amusement and mild boredom, appeared shaken. Wagging a finger, he reminded Netanyahu that he had recently hosted him at the Prime Minister’s residence. “Four times you invited me to Balfour!” he shouted. “Four times!”

With Naftali Bennett installed as Prime Minister, Abbas had a different problem: Bennett accused opponents of sneaking “like thieves in the night to meet Mansour.” Meanwhile, opposition lawmakers insisted that Abbas was secretly controlling the Prime Minister, forcing him into awkward displays of obeisance. In September, when Bennett appeared on Time’s 100 Most Influential People list, Abbas was asked to write the entry. His opening line was: “In the end, it all comes down to courage.”

Throughout the past year, Abbas had demonstrated his skill at navigating life in the belly of the whale. Still, he told me, “there are moments when you ask yourself, What’s the limit of my ability to withstand this? You find yourself alone.” He might be a cynical operative in a broken system. He might represent the battered aspirations of a sidelined minority. For now, though, he finds himself positioned to deliver something extraordinary to the Arab citizens of Israel: a corrective, in the form of improved living conditions, to years of governmental neglect. “All I’m saying is that I’m a citizen and I want to make use of my rights,” he told me. “I ignore ceilings and walls and attempts at exclusion. I gallop forward, until someone stops me.”

At the meeting, the council’s engineer listed the area’s problems: No land for young couples. No pavement. No electricity in many homes. “At the end of the day, everyone wants to get married and start a family,” he said. “We just want to make it a little easier for people, to relieve the pressure cooker, or else things will blow up in our face.”

Abbas, munching on a fig, slowly wiped his fingers with a napkin. While the participants took turns voicing their complaints—“We don’t have a school”; “There’s nothing to prevent young people from dropping out and turning to crime”—the others tried to gauge his reaction. Finally, after hearing from everyone (except the woman, whose role seemed to consist solely of changing slides), Abbas spoke. He said that he would proudly serve as the “interface” between the councils and the government bureaus. Together, they would decide on “applicability goals.” (Abbas has lately adopted the aspirational, hazy lingo of Israel’s startup world, peppering speeches with talk of “technological frontiers” and “untapped human capital.”) Then he turned serious. With Netanyahu’s economic package, he said, Arab municipalities were barely consulted. “Today, the money is in our hands. That’s the strength of this political partnership. We’re beyond the point of ‘do for us,’ ‘give to us.’ ”

In a sense, Abbas was asking the men to accept the same kinds of compromises that he had accepted: to insure, at every turn, that they didn’t antagonize Jewish Israelis. “Let’s not present the council as weak,” he said. “Let’s talk about its strength in this wonderful area. That’s how we can achieve things!” His voice lifted. “Victimization will get us nowhere.”

“For seventy years, it got us nowhere,” one of the participants whispered.

“I’m here for you,” Abbas went on. “My success is your success. Yalla.” ♦


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