MK Mansour Abbas, chairman of the United Arab List (Ra'am), has announced that he plans to retire from the Knesset.
In an interview with Independent Arabia last week, Abbas said that the upcoming elections would be the last time he runs for Knesset, and that he would then make way for the party's younger leadership.
Abbas said that Ra'am seeks to replace the current government, which he described as "racist and fascist," with a government of change that would include Ra'am and give it a position of influence in order to benefit Arab society.
"We [Ra'am] want to be the complementary bloc needed to achieve a coalition of more than 61 seats," Abbas said.
Addressing diplomatic issues, Abbas said, "The extreme right in Israel wants to bring all of us to the point of despairing of the possibility of a two-state solution."
According to Abbas, the majority of Israeli society believes that the only opportunity to reach a solution is through separation between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs, and that the practical expression of such separation is the establishment of a Palestinian state.
"The Palestinian state has already been established, and there is international recognition of the Palestinian state. You only need to establish that existence through action on the ground," Abbas stressed.