MK Mansour Abbas' announcement that he had indeed met with senior former Hamas strongman Khaled Mashaal to convey messages on behalf of Israeli officials has been the talk of the town the entire week. Everyone spoke about it in the Arab society in Israel, in the Palestinian Authority, and even in some parts of the Arab world.
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Abbas did not stop there, however. He added that he had also met with "terrorists" in Israeli prisons when referring to Palestinian security prisoners, which drew widespread criticism.
This incident was not the first time Abbas had to apologize for an unfortunate choice of words or statements that disregarded certain sensitivities in the Arab world.
Abbas has lately been perceived as supporting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud in exchange for political promises.
However, this story is bigger than Abbas himself. The chairman of Ra'am belongs to the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement, which is part of the Muslim Brotherhood. After the Oslo Accords, the Islamic Movement tried to integrate into Israeli politics and, in defiance of its own ideology, even registered the Ra'am party and took part in a Knesset election for the first time in history.
As a result, in 1996, the Islamic movement split into the Northern Branch, which is considered more radical, boycotted the elections and was later even banned by the government; and the Southern Branch, which sent representatives to the Knesset and developed close ties with its officials to promote, among other things, negotiations between Jewish leadership and radical Islamic organizations like Hamas and Jihad.
At the same time, the Southern Branch maintains constant communication with top leaders in the Arab world, especially in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and no doubt conveys messages to them from various political, religious, perhaps even security officials in Israel.
If Abbas is to be believed, Israel's security forces are well aware of every development in the Southern Branch and how it negotiates with radicals in the Arab world. That might be the reason why these officials can move around freely, unlike leaders of the Northern Branch, whose connection to Hamas provokes harsh criticism from the political echelon.
The social and religious agenda of the Southern and Northern branches are almost the same. They share the same view on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the status of Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. But unlike the Northern Branch, the Southern one is open to participating in the political life of Israel, maintaining a dialogue with its leaders and society, and communicating with political and even security officials.
In many ways, the Northern Branch has broken away from the Arab "boycott," and because of this, the party's split from the Joint Arab List and willingness to be the first one to cooperate pragmatically and politically is not a turning point, but a realization of its vision of integrating into Israel's political life following the Oslo Accords. What remains to be seen is whether the tree that was planted back then will bear fruit in the 2021 election.
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