Abbas studied to be a dentist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has a license to practice dentistry. During those years, he was the head of the Arab Students’ Committee and a follower of Sheikh Abdullah Nimar Darwish, the founder of the Islamic Movement in Israel. He became a leader in the Islamic Movement, eventually being named deputy chairman of its moderate Southern Branch. He is, according to his biography on the Knesset website, the formulator and author of the Islamic Movement Charter, which reinforces Wasatiya Islam, defined as moderation or a “middle way.”
Upon graduation, Abbas briefly practiced dentistry, a profession he reportedly pursued to please his parents, but kept circling back to his activism on behalf of the Islamic Movement, and politics.
Abbas founded his United Arab List Party ahead of the 1996 elections and it has run in all subsequent elections either as part of electoral alliances or, in the last election, on its own. He is, according to his biography, studying at the University of Haifa for a master’s
degree in political science.
The left-wing Israeli daily Haaretz reports that as a leader of Arab students at Hebrew University, Abbas sought to achieve the students’ rights by negotiating directly with the university administration instead of waging an ideological battle.
His decision to support Israel’s 36 th Government is a continuation of this mindset, according to Haaretz: “He had branded himself as the authentic representative of the common people, marking the secular elites as irrelevant, and has adopted a pragmatic approach that has spawned a utilitarian agenda – all at the expense of national issues and questions of identity.”
The newspaper calls Abbas “an intellectual with broad horizons and a man of letters who occasionally sounds a note of religious fanaticism. He has met with some of the people most hostile to Israel but doesn’t hesitate to deliver a speech against a backdrop
of the country’s flag and symbols. He’s a wizard of compromises and political alliances who’s capable of aborting those ties in an instant and turning his back on his associates.”
But Sami Abu Shehadeh, a Knesset member for the Joint List, the coalition of predominantly Arab parties that included Ra’am until the most recent election, writes in a recent op-ed that: “People like Abbas are part of the past. Palestinians in the streets,
bolstered by global campaigns of solidarity, have shown that we are much stronger than many expected. … Any pragmatic political engagement between Palestinians and Jewish Israelis should be based on the fundamental principles of equality, freedom, justice and
security for all.”
In recent months, Abbas has alternately called for an end to the occupation of Palestinian territories that he says is turning Israel into an apartheid state and said, in an address in Hebrew, that “what we have in common is greater than what divides us,” and that “now is the time for change.”