Ex-Intel Officer Warns on Ra'am Coalition Security Risks

A retired senior intelligence officer has issued a stark warning about the security implications of including the Ra'am party and its leader Mansour Abbas in a future Israeli government coalition.

Lt. Col. (ret.) Marco Moreno, who served in Unit 504, an Israeli military intelligence unit focused on human intelligence gathering, raised his concerns in an interview with Avi Greenzeig on the "We Are the Majority" program on Galei Israel radio. Moreno criticized what he described as a media campaign to rehabilitate Abbas's image, noting that the Ra'am chairman has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood movement and has struggled to explicitly label Hamas a terrorist organization. "They took a man from the Muslim Brotherhood, someone who had difficulty calling Hamas a terrorist organization. He thinks it's a nationalist organization, freedom fighters and so on," Moreno said.

Moreno acknowledged the political arithmetic driving left-wing parties toward Arab political factions but emphasized the potential security costs. "The left understands very well that it cannot form a coalition without Arab votes, there's nothing to be done, those are the numbers," he explained. "It's very dangerous if Abbas sits in the next government, because a non-Zionist party and its representatives could sit in the cabinet and be exposed to intelligence about targeted killings."

The former intelligence officer questioned how Israel's security establishment could function under such circumstances. "Do you think anyone will activate this? Every operation, even the simplest one, will have to pass through the prism of the Muslim Brotherhood," Moreno warned, expressing concern that operational decisions could be constrained by the worldview of coalition partners opposed to Israel's core security doctrine.