For months, the democratic right of Arab Israelis to elect representatives and to be represented in government has been reduced to a superficial, overused, and outdated test: will Mansour Abbas, leader of Ra'am (the United Arab List), and other Arab Israeli politicians state the obvious? Will they condemn Hamas and publicly declare it a terrorist organization?
Ra'am has already accepted the principles that Gadi Eisenkot, tasked with forming a government, has laid out for any partner in a future coalition: recognition of Israel as a Jewish, democratic and liberal state, commitment to the Declaration of Independence, and a service framework for all citizens.
But despite its acceptance of all of the conditions, supported by the fact that 68% of Arab citizens, a recent survey found, support a national-service framework for Arab youth, their acknowledgment of their lived reality, which certainly is not in Switzerland, but in a Jewish state that reminds its Arab minority by nearly every national emblem that of its minority status, and its neither-here-nor-there chronic condition: the demands Arab Israelis prove loyalty persists and stings.
Arab Israeli leaders, from the Jewish-Arab socialists of Hadash and the Palestinian nationalists of Balad to the conservative Islamists of Ra'am, have repeatedly condemned terrorism against civilians, and even against IDF soldiers. That should have ended the conversation long ago. But if you are an Arab citizen of Israel, it is only the beginning of a repeated demand to confess.
It has become evidently clear that the demand, therefore, to condemn and call out terror has less to do with Hamas than with a chronic obsession with testing the loyalty of two million Israeli citizens.
Condemning the October 7 massacre
On October 7, 2023, as the massacre was still unfolding, Abbas called on Arab citizens to reject any call to violence. "I and the rest of the party members condemned the horrific massacre in the South from the first moment," he later said.
Three days later, he reminded the Islamic world that "the religion of Islam does not allow believers to keep women, children and the elderly captive." In November 2023, Abbas doubled down, saying the massacre "does not reflect Arab society, the Palestinian people, and the Islamic nation."
Abbas voiced the mainstream of Arab Israeli society. After all, his party's base, the Bedouin community of the Negev, is the Arab Israeli community hit hardest by October 7 and the war that followed.
At least 17 Bedouin citizens were killed that day and in the days after, by rockets and by terrorists for whom being Muslim was no protection. The story of hijabi Aisha al-Ziyadne, a 17-year-old who was kidnapped to Gaza with two of her brothers and their father, illustrates that.
“Arab citizens are also victims of terror,” Mansour Abbas stated in a televised interview after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s relentless incitement against Arab Israeli parties during his speech at the 26th Knesset’s inauguration earlier this week.
Arab Israelis who sacrificed their lives to save fellow Israelis
And while Arab Israelis are indeed victims of terror, some even walked into the fire and paid with their lives to rescue fellow Israelis. Abd al-Rahman Nasasra, shot dead while trying to save partygoers at the Nova festival, is only one name.
Hostage Farhan al-Qadi was rescued by soldiers from a Hamas tunnel; another. Samer al-Talalka was not as lucky as Qadi. He escaped his captors together with two Jewish Israeli hostages, Yotam Haim and Alon Shamriz, only for all three to be mistakenly shot by the army that was supposed to save them.
Their story is an example of solidarity, and their tragic fate serves as a reminder that we are all Israelis, and all indeed victims of the dire reality of terror and bloodshed.
And not only from Gaza. In April 2024, seven-year-old Amina al-Hassouni was critically wounded by shrapnel from an Iranian missile in an unrecognized Bedouin village with no shelter and no siren. In June 2025, an Iranian missile killed four women from one family in the northern Arab town of Tamra, and the list goes on.
On October 7, the vast majority of Arab Israelis stood with Israel, and many of us understood something painful and clarifying that some still refuse to accept: whatever happens to our country and our Jewish fellow citizens will happen to us too.
Polls showed majority of Arab Israelis condemned Oct. 7 attacks
The polls confirm that understanding. In the first week after the massacre, 77% of Arab citizens condemned the October 7 attack, and 85% opposed the kidnapping of civilians. A month later, a Konrad Adenauer Program survey at Tel Aviv University found that more Arab citizens considered Israel's military response justified than not, 47% to 44%.
For a community constantly exposed to Palestinian suffering, that was an upheaval. Similar polls show Israeli identity ranked as the most important part of Israel's Arabs' identity, ahead of Arab identity itself and far ahead of Palestinian identity.
These are not the numbers of a fifth column to be shut out of government. They are the numbers of a community that knows exactly which side of the fence it lives on, a community that understands civic responsibility and wants to be part of the national burden sharing.
That is precisely why the demand still stings and irritates Arab Israeli public and politicians alike, to the point that we refuse to cooperate with the notion and logic behind it.
Pollster Yousef Makladeh, head of the Stat-Net institute, put his finger on it on Channel 13 last week.
His post-election survey found that 43% of Arab citizens agree that Hamas should be recognized as a terrorist organization, 30% do not, and 26% don't know. Makladeh explained the hesitation of a vast majority of Arab Israelis.
In Arabic, he noted, "recognition" in Hebrew and English translates to i'tiraf, which also means "confession." The Arab citizen being asked, he said, then asks himself: "Why do I need to confess? What did I do wrong? What do I have to do with Hamas? I was murdered too. I was kidnapped too."
That is precisely why, to many Arab citizens, the demand comes across not as a request to state the obvious, but as a demand to confess to a crime they did not commit.
'Impossible to put us to loyalty test': Abbas pushes back on terror supporter label
Abbas named it: "It is impossible to constantly put us to this loyalty test." He asked to be allowed to remain "a bridge," and, chillingly, for "a space to protect myself and my family." That is not a leader who sympathizes with Hamas. It is a man, a father, a husband, and a devoted leader who knows what Hamas does to Arabs it considers traitors.
He has reason to know. When Ra'am joined the Bennett-Lapid government in 2021, becoming the first Arab party ever to sit in an Israeli coalition, it was smeared from both directions.
On the Right, Netanyahu and his partners, who months earlier had courted Abbas, branded Ra'am terror supporters and accused the government of relying on "the Muslim Brotherhood." In Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, the architect of October 7, called Abbas "Abu Righal," the traitor of Arab legend. Abbas replied: "We don't owe him anything."
I have no illusions about political Islam. As a queer liberal Arab Israeli, I was personally smeared by members of the United Arab List in 2021 while lobbying in the Knesset for the rights of Arab LGBTQ people.
I am not in any way more enthusiastic about Islamists in government than I am about haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties in government. If anything, I would rather see the secularist democratic socialists of the Joint in government instead of conservative Raam or United Torah Judaism.
But I live in a parliamentary democracy, and today, in our new post-October 2026 reality, the path to a pragmatic, stable coalition, a government committed to rule of law and democratic, even egalitarian, Jewish values that reflects the majority of Israelis actually elected goes through Islamist Ra’am.
And yes, despite its Muslim conservatism, Ra'am is unique. It belongs to the southern branch of Israel's Islamic Movement, which split from the northern branch in the 1990s over taking part in Israeli democracy.
The northern branch, led by Raed Salah, chose rejection and was outlawed in 2015. The southern branch chose integration and pragmatism. Three decades later, its political leader says openly and clearly that "the State of Israel was born a Jewish state, and it will remain a Jewish state."
In a region where political Islam has too often meant Hamas or Hezbollah, that is proof it can be pragmatic and democratic, and that Israel can be its home without jeopardizing its national identity and security. Israel should be embracing and even showcasing Ra'am, not interrogating it.
If loyalty tests are in order, let us apply them evenly. In 2015, Bezalel Smotrich declared that "Hamas is an asset."
In May, the finance minister was asked which was more serious, the October 7 massacre or a government with Mansour Abbas. "Certainly the formation of the government with Abbas," he answered.
Nobody demanded that Smotrich, or the senior ministers who spoke of nuking Gaza or emptying it of its people, recognize, confess, or apologize. Nobody conditioned their place at the cabinet table on it.
Arab Israelis: the public and its leaders have condemned terror in Arabic, Hebrew, and English. They have paid for October 7 and wars in blood and blood labels. It is time to treat one-fifth of the country as what they are: citizens who share the country's fate and are ready to share its burden.
If Mansour Abbas says the word, as reports suggest he is now prepared to do in exchange for a real partnership, good.
But the question was never really about him. It is whether Israel's Jewish majority will finally stop asking its Arab citizens to confess, and start counting them as the partners they have repeatedly proved to be.
The writer is an independent Arab Israeli writer and political commentator, a former LGBTQ activist, and reporter.
Follow us on GoogleSource: The Jerusalem Post · EDEN BARZOABI
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