Yashar party chairman Gadi Eisenkot denied on Wednesday that he promised to bring Ra’am into a future government or coalition, during a meeting with Bedouin local authority heads on Tuesday.
The denial followed an N12 news report in which northern Bedouin local authority heads who met Eisenkot on Tuesday said he had promised to include Ra’am in a government he would lead.
Mu’id al-Heib, head of the Tuba-Zanghariya Local Council, told Radio Nas that Eisenkot had said contacts were underway with Ra’am and that he would work to include the party in his next government.
The party shared footage of Eisenkot's meeting with the Bedouin leaders
Yashar rejected the report outright and released footage of Eisenkot’s meeting with the Bedouin leaders. It also distributed a separate clip of remarks by Eisenkot from the meeting, as well as another of remarks by al-Heib.
The party stressed that Eisenkot did not discuss the makeup of the next government at any point during the meeting. “Throughout the entire meeting, as well as during the meal that took place afterward and was also documented, Eisenkot did not refer at all to the structure or composition of the next government,” Yashar stated.
“Any other publication on the matter is a complete lie,” it added.
Forming coalition could be challenging without Arab parties, polls show
The report came as recent polls show that both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc and the opposition bloc seeking to replace him lack the ability to secure a majority, suggesting that forming a coalition without the support of the Arab parties could prove challenging.
In 2021, Ra’am joined the coalition with the Naftali Bennett-Yair Lapid government, marking the first time an Arab party was a formal member of a governing coalition. The move to include Ra’am was highly criticized.
Although Ra’am now seeks to rejoin a coalition, most opposition parties in the bloc seeking to replace Netanyahu have rejected the possibility of forming a government with any Arab party. Most of them have said that a coalition with Arab parties would not be viable after the October 7 massacre.
Eisenkot’s Yashar party has been leading in recent polling with around 23 seats, surpassing Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party.
While the Likud has repeatedly said that Eisenkot is attempting to form a government with the Arab parties, and cannot do so without their support, the Yashar head has denied the accusations.
On Sunday, the Likud announced that it would file requests to the Central Elections Committee to ban both the Arab-led parties – Ra’am and the Joint List – from running in the October 27 election.
The CEC can vote to approve the petitions next week, but similar disqualification decisions concerning the Arab parties have been overturned by the High Court in the past.