Over the past two years Israelis have gone to the polls four times to elect a government to run the country, and each time Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, leader for 15 of the last 25 years, failed to muster up support to form even a narrow coalition. The people on the left, center and right who wanted to bring him down couldn’t form one either.

But in the latest election, in April, a kingmaker emerged: Abbas, the Islamist politician who made the remarkable declaration that he would be willing to be part of a right-wing coalition, something no Arab-led party has ever considered.

The deal was delayed by a war. In May, hostilities sparked by forced evictions of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem set off communal violence in mixed Jewish-Arab cities across Israel, and precipitated a conflict between the Israeli military and militants in Gaza. The rioting and violence in the mixed cities especially shone a spotlight on the conditions facing Palestinian citizens of Israel, sometimes called ‘Arab Israelis’, who live w