What's Driving Israeli Islamist Leader Mansour Abbas?
He quotes the Koran as precisely as he cites Switzerland's Constitution. His campaign was flagrantly homophobic but he speaks differently in backrooms. He has no compunctions about cruelly turning his back on his associates. Mansour Abbas is now in position of unprecedented influence in Israeli politics. What’s next for him?
Hilo Glazer
Jul. 1, 2021
The committee of Arab students that was active at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the 1990s was considered a breeding ground for young revolutionaries. Its representatives – activists who honed their views in tempestuous debates over lofty issues – usually belonged to the humanities, social sciences or law faculties. They would go on to take important roles in the intellectual elite of Israel’s Arab community. Mansour Abbas was not one of them.
Abbas was a member of the Islamic Movement and a student of dentistry, and as such, his ties to that clique that were less than loose. But Abbas, today head of the United Arab List party in the Knesset, was a revolutionary of a different sort. He gathered around him a number of religiously observant students, some of whom were politically unaffiliated, and others who were disappointed in the socialist Hadash party, and from them forged a new political alliance – a group called Tahaluf (the Covenant). Together with them he wove a general philosophy dealing with life itself. In place of staging demonstrations tinged with a national hue, they sought to achieve the rights accruing to them by negotiating directly with the university administration; instead of engaging in ideological controversies, they aimed to improve the conditions in their dorms. The Arab students flocked to Abbas – and against all odds he was elected head of the committee.
“Back then Mansour was a headache for Hadash and the other parties,” recalls Nihad Bukai, who is a publisher today and who was active in Hadash’s campus group at the time. “He didn’t present himself as a candidate of the Islamic Movement, but as the students’ candidate. He said, ‘We’re fed up with ideology, let’s deal with what’s important for the Arab students, we’ll concentrate on getting benefits.’ And it worked.”
The similarities between Abbas’ initial political experience and the path he’s embarked on today are tough to miss. He had branded himself as the authentic representative of the common people, marking the secular elites as irrelevant, and has adopted a pragmatic approach that has spawned a utilitarian agenda – all at the expense of national issues and questions of identity. Abbas’ sophistication, political acumen and deal-making skills were already on display in his student days.
In 1998, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the campus in Jerusalem. Introducing the Arab students’ senior representative – 23-year-old Abbas – to him, a university official predicted, “You’ll be meeting him in the Knesset one day.”
Two decades would pass until that next encounter, but from there Abbas’ political trajectory was far more rapid. Three years after first being elected to the Knesset on behalf of Ra’am, the United Arab List, Abbas captured the party’s leadership, withdrew it from the four-party Arab Joint List, forged a close alliance with Netanyahu’s Likud, was one election campaign promise – a promise broken by Bezalel Smotrich (Religious Zionism) – away from giving Netanyahu a sixth term as prime minister – and then led his party into the government led by the “coalition for change,” the first time ever for an Arab party.
Abbas achieved this at the age of just 47 by dint of a singular basket of traits. He’s an intellectual with broad horizons and a man of letters who occasionally sounds a note of religious fanaticism. He has met with some of the people most hostile to Israel but doesn’t hesitate to deliver a speech against a backdrop of the country’s flag and symbols. He’s a wizard of compromises and political alliances who’s capable of aborting those ties in an instant and turning his back on his associates. He is sensitive and cries easily, but is also a crafty politician who’s skilled at neutralizing his rivals. He earned his status thanks to his Islamic education and his deep acquaintance with the Koran, but also quotes clauses from the Swiss Constitution at will and surprises his interlocutors by rattling off the rankings of the countries participating in the Eurovision Song Contest.
All that remains now is to figure out what exactly he is aspiring to achieve with the unprecedented position of influence he has achieved. Abbas, like other members of the UAL and official figures in the Islamic Movement, declined to cooperate with this article. A plunge into his biography – and the dramatic transformations that have been fomented by his movement – can offer broad hints as to why.
Meetings and gossip
Abbas, who is married and the father of three children of elementary school age, grew up in Maghar, northwest of Lake Kinneret in the Galilee, a town where Druze, Muslims and Christians have good neighborly relations most of the time. His father ran a small grocery store that was a hub for meetings and gossip in the Muslim neighborhood in Maghar’s north. Connections to utilities were unstable: Water shortages and power outages were not foreign to Abbas and his eight siblings. On hot summer nights the children of the neighborhood slept on the rooftops, so they could enjoy the refreshing drops of morning dew.
Abbas was a standout pupil in school and was drawn particularly to religious studies. Already by the age of 17 he acquired the status of a spiritual leader, when he began delivering Friday sermons in the local mosque. Reports about the charismatic youth from the Galilee reached Sheikh Abdallah Nimr Darwish, the founder of the Islamic Movement in Israel, who added Abbas to his circle of followers, making him one of his protégés. Abbas told his friends in Maghar at the time that he aspired to devote his life to politics. His parents didn’t think this would be the optimal realization of his scholarly capabilities. They wanted their industrious son to be a physician. At their demand, he studied dentistry.
At the Hebrew University, he was swept into political activism. His ties with Sheikh Darwish grew closer during his term as chairman of the Arab students committee. Already then, Abbas displayed a constant tendency to reach for compromise, at least on the surface. In his student period he worked indefatigably to heal the rift between the Northern and Southern branches of the Islamic Movement (more on this below). Concurrently he cultivated ties with leaders who were not connected to the movement. He organized a conference to which West Bank Palestinian leaders Marwan Barghouti, Faisal Husseini and Hanan Ashrawi, as well as Israeli-Arab political leader Azmi Bishara were invited. He forged intimate relations with Bishara, the founder of the secular-nationalist Balad party. He was at Bishara’s bedside almost daily after the latter underwent a kidney transplant in 1997.
In time Abbas began to exercise his diplomatic skills outside the political arena as well, positioning himself as a wizard of the sulha – a ceremony of reconciliation between rivals – and as a fair, universally accepted arbiter. He spent the period between 2020-2021 election campaigns in the town of Kabul, in Western Galilee, to mediate between two hamulot (clans) caught up in a blood feud. The council head, Salah Rian, estimates that Abbas visited Kabul at least 20 times.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett with Mansour Abbas in the Knesset.Credit: EMMANUEL DUNAND - AFP
“It took him almost four months, including meetings that started at 2 A.M. and went on until morning,” Rian recalls. “He didn’t relent until he achieved an agreement and restored quiet to the town.” Kabul, by the way, rewarded him handsomely in the March election: The UAL obtained only 400 fewer votes than the Joint List there.
In Tur’an, however, where he was summoned urgently in the wake of a bloody cycle of revenge that had lurched out of control, his skills proved unfruitful. “Mansour wasn’t able to resolve it,” says Imad Dahla, the former local council head, whose family is involved in the conflict. “Unfortunately, he has disappeared lately, and in the meantime there is chaos here.”
Abbas practiced dentistry for a short time following his graduation, but most of his energy was devoted to public activity in the Islamic Movement. In 2007, at the young age of 33, he was appointed secretary general of the UAL. He carved his way to that senior position with sweet talk, shyness and self-effacement.
“He’s one of those people who never makes demands, always waits for his turn, even humbles himself and lowers his self-value,” says a person who’s known Abbas from his first days in politics. “He cultivates an underdog image, and the moment he’s sure that the fish has swallowed the bait, he reels it in.”
Another person, who is involved with him in the local political arena, noted: “He’s very unpredictable. He promises something, makes you believe he’s with you, and then at the last minute he changes direction because someone gave him a little more.”
Indeed, when Abbas achieved positions of influence he quickly became a dominant figure, to the chagrin of some of the party’s veterans.
“Suddenly this young guy appears and doesn’t hesitate to play against the big boys,” says journalist Mohammad Magadli, director of the news division at Radio Nas in Nazareth. “He’s an engineer of bargains, a deal maker, he dictates what the party’s Knesset slate will look like. He was given legitimization to do that, but naturally he made himself many enemies.”
Some of those enemies are his former colleagues from the Joint List. Abbas intimated to them that he believed in uniting Arabs of all ideological streams. After the Joint List split for the first time, two years ago, before the election of April 2019, Abbas led the UAL-Balad slate, but ended up a hair’s breadth below the electoral threshold. In light of that traumatic experience, Abbas was determined to reunite the Joint List. To that end he agreed to forgo the No. 2 place on the slate, which is usually reserved for UAL, and even lowered himself to fourth place, agreeing to give the third slot to Ahmad Tibi (Ta’al, Arab Movement for Renewal), who is considered his bitter rival.
Putting his ego aside proved itself: The Joint List soared to 15 Knesset seats in the election of April 2020. However, in short order, it became clear that below the surface Abbas was operating as a free agent who did not see himself obligated to toe the line of the party leadership. Even earlier he had created a channel of dialogue with Natan Eshel, Netanyahu’s close aide, who tried to persuade the UAL to back Likud’s candidate for state comptroller, Matanyahu Englman (the UAL denied having cooperated).
Subsequently he forged warm ties with two Likud MKs, Miki Zohar and Yariv Levin, both of them also close to Netanyahu. Abbas, who, in his role as deputy Knesset speaker, conducted the October 2020 vote on the establishment of a parliamentary commission of inquiry into the “submarines affair,” lent them a hand in annulling the results of the vote, in which a majority favored the creation of a commission.
It soon became apparent to the leaders of the Joint List that Abbas was claiming exclusive credit for achievements that were the results of collective efforts. He did so by sending text messages to a database of hundreds of thousands of Arab voters, at an estimated cost of 20,000 shekels (about $6,000) for each message. The first time he did this was after the Joint List leadership reached an agreement with the government on budgetary support to Arab local authorities. Asked to explain his behavior, he responded with a characteristic chuckle and admitted he had made a mistake by taking credit for the agreement.
After the Joint List reached an agreement with Kahol Lavan on suspension of the so-called Kaminitz Law, dealing with illegal construction in Arab locales, it was decided that the party would release an official announcement. But again Abbas jumped the gun: About half an hour before the agreed time, he fired off a message to his constituency boasting about the achievement. The third time Abbas resorted to this tactic the crisis between him and the rest of the Joint List became sharp and open. Abbas attacked the members of the Hadash faction who supported legislation last summer that was supposed to make conversion therapy for gays illegal, using the same huge mailing list – while he was still part of the Joint List.
Concurrently, his winks and nods to the right side of the political aisle became more frequent and blunt. Abbas gave interviews to two right-wing media outlets, Channel 20 and the newspaper Makor Rishon, signaling that he might support legislation to postpone Netanyahu’s corruption trial and even praised Smotrich for his work as transportation minister. Around this time he shared with confidants his frustration with his Joint List colleagues who, because of the dogmatic approach that rejects cooperation with the right wing would, he felt, forgo in advance the possibility of wielding influence.
Abbas, far right, with Joint List members at the President’s Residence in 2019, before the party split.Credit: Emil Salman
Last December, while Joint List leader Ayman Odeh (Hadash) was making a final effort to prevent a split in his party, and was paying visits to the members of the Shura council (a religious body of the Islamic Movement, to whose decisions the UAL is subordinate), in the hope of working out with them a formula that would placate Abbas – the latter announced that he would absent himself from the vote on the dissolution of the Knesset. The alliance between the UAL and Likud became public knowledge, and Abbas embarked on an independent path.
Abbas thereupon launched a no-holds-barred campaign directed at his former associates. His people took a relatively marginal issue in Arab society – LGBT rights – and inflated it with hostility and fear. Images of Joint List MKs were inserted into photos of Gay Pride parades against a background of rainbow flags flapping in the breeze. The goal was to single out the MKs who supported the gay community for undermining the basic values of Arab society, as contrasted with Abbas – ostensible protector of the institution of the family.
The leaders of Hadash, MKs Odeh and Aida Touma-Sliman, came in for special treatment. Researchers went over every past statement made by the latter with a fine-tooth comb and from them wove an image of a secular witch, a feminist who was an enemy of religion. “It hurt her badly,” says Fahdi Ejawi, a member of the UAL campaign team. “We opened the eyes of religious supporters of Hadash. The Joint List lost two seats just because of her.”
Social media posts echoed messages casting doubt on whether Odeh is an “authentic” Muslim (the UAL denied it was behind this). All methods were legitimate in the attempt to differentiate Abbas from his former political partners, even in the face of the danger that Arab votes would effectively be wasted. The UAL declined at the last minute to sign a surplus-votes agreement with the Joint List, citing the refusal of the latter’s leaders to promise that the MK who would be elected thanks to the agreement would not support “laws that are contrary to religious values.”
This aggressive campaign was masterminded by one individual: Iad Kayal, Abbas’ strategic adviser. In fact, it was Kayal’s strategy that in essence gave Abbas the keys to form the government. On election night, when the official results became known, Abbas devoted a good deal of his speech of thanks to Kayal. He also planted a kiss on his cheek and declared that he was no less than “the best strategic adviser in the world.”
Kayal, 40, one of the architects of the Joint List’s dismantlement (“The List became an irrelevant product,” he explained), was adept at exploiting its assets for his purposes. By referring to Ra’am by its full, original name – the United Arab List – he created a “branding equalizer” between the parties. During two months, the UAL conducted some 130 public opinion surveys and on their basis devised strategies for different constituencies: Bedouin in the Negev, Bedouin in the north, Arab women and also Christians and Druze, two groups the party later decided to forgo, as a result of the surveys.
Concurrently, he made inroads in the Jewish public. Kayal strictly forbade the others on the slate to give interviews, fearing they would say things that would be interpreted as extreme. Huge resources were invested in billboards and in media advertising in which Abbas’ image was packaged with the use of three words: Realist. Influential. Conservative. In media appearances, he shed the knee-jerk identification of Arab politicians with the Jewish left and hammered home a new message: “I am not in anyone’s pocket.”
Kayal was also behind a speech that Abbas delivered in Hebrew on Passover eve, which was calculated to pave his way to a right-wing coalition. When it emerged that this was unlikely to happen, Kayal set out to consolidate Abbas’ status as kingmaker and to portray the Joint List as a fifth wheel. Until that moment, the talk was that the UAL’s MKs would abstain in the vote for the government Yair Lapid was trying to form. That would have created a deadlock between the “supporters of change” (before the defection of Yamina MK Amichai Chikli) and those who backed Netanyahu – 58 votes for each side – thus giving Odeh and the Joint List tremendous power. Abbas, prodded by Kayal, created a new equation. He announced that he would not abstain in the vote on any government that would come up for the Knesset’s approval.
During the hostilities in May, when Abbas visited a ransacked synagogue in Lod, and declared that the Islamic Movement would help restore it, there were increasing calls in the movement for him to be deposed. But the most painful blow came in what should be his home court. When he wanted to visit the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, one of the symbols of the recent uprising, activists there informed him that he was not welcome. “We told him that he was unacceptable to us,” Salah Diab, one of the leaders of the protest, told Haaretz.
United Arab List party leader Mansour Abbas, Yamina party leader Naftali Bennett and Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid, sit together in Ramat Gan, near Tel AvivCredit: UNITED ARAB LIST / REUTERS
Capitals of UAL-land
The criticism of his non-nationalist approach abated as soon as Abbas succeeded in leading his faction to its unprecedented political achievement. In a historic photograph last month showing Abbas, Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid signing the agreements they had concluded, two individuals who may be unfamiliar to the public appear behind the threesome: Razi Issa, executive director of the Islamic Association for Orphans and the Needy, and Walid Alhawashla, the UAL’s spokesperson.
What matters is not the titles the two bear but the fact that they are leading representatives of two parts of the country where the UAL is dominant. Issa is from Kafr Qasem, headquarters of the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement and the place from which it sprung. Alhawashla, who is from the Bedouin dispersed communities, represents the close alliance the movement has cultivated with the Bedouin population, in the framework of which Rahat, a city of some 70,000 residents north of Be’er Sheva, became a center of social activity. One city in the south of the Triangle (the cluster of Arab towns and villages in the country’s center) and the other in the northern Negev – these are the capitals of UAL-land.
Kafr Qasem is the key to understanding the movement’s vision. It is its spiritual, conceptual and political center; the movement rules over and manages it. In fact, this city, with a population of about 25,000, has taken its fate into its own hands – constituting a kind of local experiment in autonomy.
Since the 1980s, other than during brief breaks, the Kafr Qasem municipality has been controlled by a candidate of the Islamic Movement. It has its own laws and norms (for example, the mayor is limited to two terms) and an independent, religious, semi-military organization, Hashmira (the Guardian), is in charge of maintaining public order and is financed by the local authority. It has three command posts, and its head, Abdel Samia Taha, is dubbed the “chief of staff.” The city’s relatively low property-crime rate is due to Hashmira. Over the years that group has also functioned as a kind of modesty patrol, dealing with women suspected of adultery and expelling any possible female sex workers from the city.
The police are not convinced that Hashmira is guided by moral values in its social actions, and they believe the organization has ties with criminal elements. In recent years the police have also taken measures to curb the organization’s activity. In 2018, following a request from the police, the Interior Ministry prohibited the municipality from employing people identified with the group. More recently, though, those relations have taken a new turn.
Dr. Rodayna Badir, who works in the sphere of education, is among the leading lights in Kafr Qasem. The present mayor, Adel Badir, is from her husband’s family, and her brother MK Esawi Freige, of Meretz, is the government’s newly appointed regional cooperation minister. As a woman with some standing in the city, Badir allows herself to criticize the Islamic Movement, speaking out as few would dare to, certainly not women. “All the resources of Kafr Qasem are diverted to their cronies,” she tells me when we meet. “If you’re not part of the Islamic Movement, you’re out. Loyalty to the movement is stronger than loyalty to the hamula. All the budgets go through the Islamic Movement,” she says.
Al-Aqsa Square in Kafr Qasem.Credit: Tomer Appelbaum
The tight grip of the Islamic Movement is altering the city’s social fabric, Badir claims: “A woman who walks on the street without a head covering is considered a ‘modern’ woman, in the bad sense of the word. She will have fewer opportunities, even if she is has an academic degree. In contrast, everyone will praise and promote a woman in a head covering who completes a kindergarten assistant course. It’s no longer a matter of respect for religion, but of surrendering to social norms they impose. Young girls observe this and take it in.”
It should be noted that Abbas has spearheaded an effort for women to hold key posts within the movement. He pushed for appointment of a first female kadi in a sharia court, and also promoted Iman Khatib, No. 5 on the UAL slate, who served briefly in the Knesset and is currently the movement’s deputy chairwoman.
Nevertheless, Rodayna Badir views Abbas’ rise with concern and is particularly upset at the creation of the new Special Committee on Arab Society Affairs in the Knesset, which he heads. “That returns us to the days of the mukhtar,” she says, “a kind of official who is loyal to the authorities and has autonomy to manage the whole life of the village. It’s dangerous.”
She is seconded by a veteran social activist in Kafr Qasem, who asked not to be identified by name: “The goal of the Islamic Movement is to do at a national level what they are doing at the community level. In other words, to replicate the Kafr Qasem model, to seize command of Arab society and to signal to people that they have one ‘address’ to turn to.”
Mansour Abbas.Credit: Ofer Vaknin
“Mansour Abbas should not be seen as a sign of Israelization,” he said. “Abbas is turning his back on Israelis and Jews. He has no interest in the method of government, the rule of law or freedom of the press. He accepts the thesis that we [Arabs] are living in the belly of the whale and that we need to behave accordingly. In other words: as subjects, protected persons.”
The term “living in the belly of the whale” is borrowed from the doctrine of Islamic Movement founder Abdallah Nimr Darwish. According to Dr. Nasia Shemer, of the Middle Eastern studies department at Bar-Ilan University, the practical translation of the term is “practices deriving from reality.” She notes: “There is a dream that is the realization of the basic Palestinian identity, and there is the reality, which is the State of Israel.”
Moments of crisis
In contrast to his natural ally Arye Dery, Abbas can cry without the help of an onion. He wept bitterly at the funeral of Sheikh Darwish, and his eyes can grow moist even when he’s involved in splitting hairs about a lofty religious issue. In the election last March, when the UAL’s negative campaign tore through the Arab locales and Abbas was labeled a “traitor” and “collaborator” in various forums, he also experienced a moment of crisis and shed a tear.
But the greatest crisis from his point of view, which also struck in the middle of the election campaign, was the death from cancer of his older brother Nassar, with whom he was very close. Two of their sisters also succumbed to the disease recently. In an interview with the Knesset Channel last December, Abbas revealed that at certain moments he wondered whether there is a hidden connection between his political path and the series of tragedies that have struck his family. “I thought that if I were to leave it [politics], maybe it would end,” he said, his voice trembling and his eyes moist.
Afterward came the achievement in the election and the successful maneuver into the coalition. Now, at least for the foreseeable future, he seems to have no intention of leaving the stage.
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