Israel’s Knesset has 120 members, veterans and newcomers alike. Among them are the members of Ra’am—hoping to repeat their 2021 achievement and rejoin the coalition. But behind the names on the party list lies an extremist wing, elected by an entire public as their representative.
Ra’am, the Arab party led by Mansour Abbas, already made history in 2021 when it became the first Arab party to join a Zionist coalition. Now they’re trying to repeat that feat—last week they recommended Gadi Eisenkot for prime minister.
In recent years, disturbing archival footage of Mansour Abbas has surfaced, including praise for terror and terrorists. But Abbas isn’t the only one in Ra’am with a controversial past. Today we’ll dive into the archive of Walid Taha, number 3 on the list. When first elected to the Knesset, Taha declared in a video posted online that he represents all areas of ‘Palestine’—meaning Gaza and Judea and Samaria as well: “A special blessing, perfumed with fragrant flowers, I send to the brothers who gave me their trust, so that I may represent them and all the areas of our beloved ‘Palestine’ in the upcoming parliamentary elections.”
And that’s not all. In 2020, Taha went to the home of antisemitic Sheikh Ikrima Sabri in East Jerusalem while Israeli police arrived to serve the sheikh with a restraining order from the Temple Mount for his inflammatory and inciting words against the state. Over the years, Sabri has expressed support for suicide bombings, praised terrorists who carried out attacks against Israelis, eulogized Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on the Temple Mount, and participated in conferences alongside senior Hamas and Hezbollah officials where calls were heard for Israel’s destruction.
1+Taha shared a video he filmed near the sheikh’s home in which he declared: “We came today to the home of the honorable Sheikh Ikrima Sabri to express solidarity.” Later in the video he added: “They are conducting a campaign of persecution against him using despicable means, of a terrorist and psychological nature, unworthy of a state that claims to be democratic, but rather of a state that occupies a people, that occupies the Arab-‘Palestinian’ state of Jerusalem.”
In 2020, Maher al-Akhras, a prominent Islamic Jihad terrorist in Judea and Samaria, began a hunger strike in prison protesting his administrative detention and was hospitalized. Walid Taha, who was already an MK then, came to visit him several times at Kaplan Hospital. On the day the terrorist’s administrative detention was canceled, Taha posted on Facebook opening with the words: “The determination of the heroic prisoner Maher al-Akhras defeated the jailers.”
1+So alongside Ra’am’s attempt to return to the coalition stand the videos and quotes from the party leadership’s past, raising questions about the positions they bring with them to the Knesset and about the meaning of the political partnership they seek to establish. It’s another reminder for retired police commissioner Yoav Segalovitz, who chose to join Mansour Abbas’s Islamist group.