Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ weekend meeting with Nazareth Mayor Ali Salem is widely seen as a desperate gambit, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to coast to re-election on a security platform while Israeli peacemakers fade from the scene.
Why it matters: Abbas urged Salem, one of the influential Israeli Arab figures, to back a last-minute effort to reunite the four Arab-Israeli parties for the April elections. The Palestinian leader hopes to challenge Netanyahu through an Israeli Arab coalition with the center-left to usher in a new prime minister, as they did with Yitzhak Rabin in 1992.
