The Ra’am Party is not an obvious place to look for an experiment in Jewish-Arab political partnership. The United Arab List grew out of the southern branch of Israel’s Islamic Movement and historically represented conservative Muslim Arab voters. Its leader, Mansour Abbas, changed Israeli politics in 2021 by taking the unprecedented step of joining a governing coalition.

Now he is attempting something potentially more consequential: changing what Ra’am itself represents.

Last week, former Yesh Atid MK Yoav Segalovitz joined Ra’am’s electoral slate — not buried somewhere symbolically near the bottom, but at No. 2, immediately behind Abbas. That deserves more attention than the usual Israeli political horse race.

Segalovitz is Jewish, Zionist, a former IDF officer and one of Israel’s most senior former police officials. He is not joining Ra’am because he has adopted Abbas’ worldview. Indeed, he specifically says he has not. Abbas supports Palestinian statehood. Segalovitz comes from a very different political and national tradition.

Their proposition is that perhaps they do not have to resolve those differences before working together. That sounds almost banal. In contemporary Israeli politics, it is anything but.

There was resistance within Ra’am to adding a Jewish Zionist candidate. Abbas himself recently felt compelled to reassure Arab voters that accepting Israel’s Jewish character does not mean abandoning Palestinian identity or aspirations. Yet Segalovitz enjoys unusual credibility in Arab communities because of his work combating the violent crime that has devastated them.

There are even reports that other former Israeli security officials have approached Ra’am about following Segalovitz’s example. No one else has yet done so. But that they are apparently considering it suggests this may be something more than an electoral gimmick.

Abbas is attempting an extraordinarily difficult balancing act. He is telling Arab Israelis that integration need not mean assimilation: They can participate fully in Israel, enter its government, accept civic responsibilities and work alongside Zionists without ceasing to be Palestinian Arabs. At the same time, he is telling Jewish Israelis that Arab political participation need not threaten the Jewish state.

Segalovitz is testing the proposition from the other direction. He is saying that a Zionist need not agree with Abbas about Palestinian statehood — or everything else — before recognizing him as a legitimate political partner.

Both men are taking risks. And both still deserve scrutiny. Abbas cannot simply invoke Palestinian statehood without explaining what it means after Oct. 7: who governs such a state, what becomes of Hamas, whether it is demilitarized and how Israel’s security is protected. Partnership cannot require Jewish Israelis to suspend legitimate concerns.

Nor should Arab Israelis be expected to erase their national identity as the price of participation. That may be the larger significance of what Abbas and Segalovitz are attempting. Israeli politics has traditionally demanded that Jews and Arabs first settle enormous questions of history, identity and nationalism before trusting one another politically. Perhaps that has the sequence backward.

Abbas and Segalovitz are suggesting that people who profoundly disagree might first work together on crime, education, infrastructure and ordinary life — and allow trust to grow from doing rather than agreeing. It may fail. But in an Israel increasingly organized around distrust, the experiment itself is worth taking seriously.