Senior figures in United Torah Judaism have opened a regular line of communication with the leaders of Ra’am and the Joint List, keeping each other updated on their separate negotiations with Gadi Eisenkot’s change bloc, Kan News reporter Yaara Shapira reported Thursday evening.
According to the report, the contacts are aimed at positioning the chareidi and Arab parties as the deciding factor as the new bloc takes shape. Ra’am chairman Mansour Abbas has suggested that senior UTJ figures open direct talks with the change bloc to advance a draft law. In his view, such a move would give a lenient arrangement for the chareidi public legitimacy across political camps, and hand both sets of parties significant bargaining power.
UTJ chairman Yaakov Asher has held several conversations in recent days with Abbas and with Joint List MK Ahmad Tibi. Asher’s office said these were “casual conversations only,” unrelated to political contacts or coordination.
The two camps have cooperated before on issues that have resurfaced in the current talks. In late 2019, MK Moshe Gafni, then chairman of the Knesset Finance Committee, convened a hearing on Tibi’s demand to freeze the Kaminitz Law on illegal construction. Freezing that law is now a central demand of the Joint List in its negotiations with the change bloc. In 2021, Ra’am refused to back an extension of the law allowing a committee to verify religious exemptions from military service for women, forcing then-Defense Minister Benny Gantz to pull it from a vote. UTJ MKs claimed credit for persuading Ra’am to oppose it.
The report comes a day after Asher met with Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Liberman. Kikar HaShabbat described it as their first significant meeting, focused on finding a draft framework that could win the approval of Rav Dov Lando and withstand High Court review. Kan, however, reported that the encounter was unplanned and lasted only a few minutes. Asher’s office quipped that the two sit across the hall from each other, and that Asher had simply stopped by to borrow coffee.
Liberman has repeatedly said that any draft law must pass High Court scrutiny. Asher, meanwhile, has set out three core demands for any negotiations: a draft law regularizing the status of yeshiva students, funding for chareidi education without conditions tied to core curriculum studies, and preservation of the religious status quo.
While political circles debate whether the contacts signal a renewed strategic alliance, UTJ is working to cool the speculation and denies the existence of any formal political axis. Earlier this week, it was reported that Eisenkot had ordered an examination of a minority government under his leadership, one that would rely on UTJ abstaining and on partial support from Ra’am.
