When Raam leader Mansour Abbas appeared alongside former Yesh Atid lawmaker Yoav Segalovich this week and announced that Segalovich would run second on the party’s electoral slate, much of the immediate attention went to the obvious novelty: An Israeli Jewish politician, openly Zionist and a former police major-general, running near the top of the list of a conservative Islamist Arab party. That combination is unusual, and it was meant to look unusual.

Jewish participation in political lists representing Palestinian citizens of Israel is not, in itself, unprecedented. Hadash was built around a Jewish-Arab political tradition and has for decades included Jewish candidates and lawmakers. Ofer Cassif sits in the Knesset today as one of its most outspoken Jewish members. What is distinctive about the Abbas-Segalovich arrangement is not that a Jew is running with an Arab list. It is the kind of Jewish political voice Abbas has chosen to place there: a Zionist former senior police commander whose political biography sits comfortably inside the Israeli mainstream, not outside it.

Segalovich is joining Raam’s slate, not Raam itself, and the difference is easy to miss if one stops at the photograph. According to the arrangement, he will join the electoral list and parliamentary faction but will not become a member of the party. Raam’s constitution and internal decision-making structure will not change. Segalovich is also expected to retain the freedom to vote independently on questions where the ideological distance is obvious, including religion and state, security and LGBTQ rights. Abbas is not converting Raam into a Zionist party and Segalovich is not becoming an Islamist. They are testing whether two political identities that remain quite far apart can inhabit the same electoral vehicle.

I am not convinced that the main purpose of the move is electoral, at least not in the simple sense of adding more votes. Segalovich may bring some. An August Channel 13 poll suggested that a slate including him could perform somewhat better than Raam has in other surveys, and he retains unusual credibility among Arab local leaders because of his work on organised crime while serving as deputy public security minister in coalition governments led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid.

In that period he became one of the few senior Jewish officials associated in Arab public memory not only with promises about crime, but with a governmental programme that actually tried to confront it. That helps Abbas now, when criminal violence remains one of the most immediate concerns of Palestinian citizens of Israel. The arithmetic still looks secondary. What Abbas is trying to change is the political value of the seats he expects to win.

Since breaking with the Joint List and entering the Bennett-Lapid coalition in 2021, Abbas has pursued a fairly consistent experiment. His argument, sometimes stated directly and sometimes only through practice, is that Palestinian citizens of Israel have accumulated representation without converting enough of it into governing power.

Arab parties could win ten, thirteen or fifteen seats and still be treated as politically untouchable when coalitions were formed. He tried to break that wall by making Raam available for coalition politics, including with parties whose positions on the Palestinian question were very far from his own. For a short period it worked, then it didn’t.

The government collapsed, Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power, October 7 arrived and the war that followed eroded the legitimacy Abbas had labouriously built for Arab participation in a governing coalition. Jewish opposition parties that desperately need Arab seats to reach a majority still hesitate to say openly that they would govern with Raam. Avigdor Liberman, who sat in the same government with Abbas in 2021, has already said Raam cannot be a coalition partner this time. Netanyahu has gone back to one of his most effective electoral weapons: warning Jewish voters that his opponents will depend on Arab parties to govern.

Segalovich’s place as number two on the list answers that problem more than it answers a shortage of ballots, because the obstacle facing Abbas was never only how many seats Raam might win, but whether those seats would be treated as usable once the counting was over. Jewish opposition parties may need Arab mandates and still refuse to say, in public, that they would govern with them; Netanyahu’s campaign has long fed on that hesitation and Liberman’s rejection of Raam as a partner shows how quickly the old taboo returned after October 7.

A Zionist former police commander standing immediately behind Abbas does not dissolve the ideological objections to the party, yet it makes the simpler charge – that Raam stands outside legitimate Israeli politics – harder to repeat without looking past the man placed in the second slot. He is not only a candidate. He is a certificate of political usability, a way of saying that Arab votes already cast should count towards government rather than remain representation without power. That may be worth more to Abbas after October 7 than the number of Jewish voters Segalovich can actually persuade to put a Raam ballot in the box.

Abbas has again resisted returning to a full Arab Joint List for the same reason. Hadash, Taal and Balad have rebuilt a reduced version of that alliance and left the door open to Raam, but the two projects are no longer travelling in the same direction. The Joint List is trying to maximise collective Arab representation and keep a recognisably Palestinian political address. Abbas is trying to maximise the ability of Arab representation to enter the machinery of government. The aims can overlap. They are not the same. The Joint List has already criticised him for choosing Segalovich rather than rejoining the Arab alliance, and reports before the announcement indicated it was willing to press Raam to return – without Segalovich.

Palestinian politics inside Israel has carried this tension for a long time, longer than one campaign cycle. Should an Arab party first represent the collective political identity of Palestinian citizens, even at the price of remaining outside government? Or should it accept ideological compromise, perhaps a great deal of it, in order to gain access to budgets, ministries and actual decision-making? Abbas has chosen the second route more clearly than any major Arab leader before him. Segalovich takes the experiment one step further. Until now, Abbas argued that an Arab party could cooperate with Zionist parties. He is now saying, in effect, that a Zionist politician can sit inside an Arab-led parliamentary list without either side pretending their ideological differences have disappeared.

Israeli politics has spent decades demanding that Arab politicians prove they are acceptable partners while rarely making the opposite demand of Jewish parties: that they demonstrate a willingness to share political space with Palestinian citizens as equals. Putting Segalovich second on Raam’s list turns that equation around, at least symbolically. The Jewish partner is no longer inviting the Arab into his coalition. He is entering an Arab-led list.

The price is harder to ignore. The more Raam defines its success through its acceptability to Zionist coalition partners, the greater the temptation to push the Palestinian national question further outside its political programme. Segalovich has been explicit that he remains Zionist and Jewish in his political worldview.

Raam has been equally explicit that it is not asking him to become something else. The honesty is better than a fake ideological unity, but it also lays the bargain out in the open. Abbas gains a partner who can help normalise Raam inside Israeli coalition politics. Segalovich joins a slate led by a party whose strategy increasingly emphasises civil integration, crime, budgets and practical governance while leaving the deepest questions of Palestinian national rights somewhere more distant.

The move will not look the same to every part of the electorate. To some Palestinian voters it may demonstrate maturity: politics is about delivering results, not guarding ideological purity from the opposition benches. To others it will look like another stage in transforming Palestinian political power into a tool whose value is measured by how little discomfort it causes the Zionist mainstream. Neither reading is empty. Asking whether Segalovich will bring Raam another seat or two is therefore a smaller question than the one Abbas is actually placing on the table.

He wants the argument after the election to be less about whether Jewish parties are allowed to rely on Arab votes and more about what they are prepared to offer for them. Segalovich is there to make that conversation easier for Jewish politicians. Whether the same move makes Abbas’s argument easier to defend among Palestinian citizens is a separate problem, and he knows it.

That is not simply coexistence. It is a political transaction, and perhaps a very calculated one. The test will not be how many Jewish voters follow Segalovich into Raam on election day. It will come afterwards, when Jewish opposition leaders still have to decide whether they can say publicly what they struggle to say now: that a government supported by Palestinian citizens and their political representatives is no less legitimate because of it.

If Abbas succeeds at that, Segalovich may bring Raam very few additional votes and still prove one of its most consequential candidates. The thing Abbas is really trying to increase is not Raam’s vote share. It is the political worth of an Arab vote after it has already been cast.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.