After President Reuven Rivlin tasked opposition leader Benny Gantz on Oct. 23 with forming Israel’s next government, and after the chair of the Blue and White party initiated a call to Arab Joint List Chair Ayman Odeh, the two met Oct. 31 to discuss possible cooperation between their two Knesset factions.

Blue and White’s official position is to strive for a liberal national unity government with the Likud party, as Gantz made clear upon accepting the mandate from Rivlin, and as his party colleague and coalition negotiator Knesset member Ofer Shelah explained when interviewed for a previous Al-Monitor article.

However, this is the first such meeting between a prime ministerial candidate and an Arab party head since 2006, when Ehud Olmert was tasked with forming the country’s government. “I invited the Arab parties to meet after receiving the mandate to form a government,” Olmert told Al-Monitor this week. “There was clearly no chance of them joining the coalition, but it was important that I present at least a semblance of their being part of the political game.” His replacement at the head of the Kadima party, Tzipi Livni, avoided talks with the Arab parties when she was tasked with forming the government following Olmert’s 2008 resignation, and opted to return the mandate to the president after failing to assemble a majority coalition.

The very meeting between Gantz and Odeh points to how far the candidate for Israel’s premiership has come since entering the political arena. Just one year ago, Gantz shunned the Arab electorate and did not even offer any Muslim or Christian candidate a slot on his party’s Knesset list prior to the elections. He did include an Arab Druze candidate, Knesset member Gadeer Kamal-Mreeh, perhaps because most Israeli Jews tend to believe that the Druze are not Arabs. In his first interview as Blue and White leader to Israel’s three major television news shows in Marc, Gantz went as far as to rule out any political discourse with the Arab parties. He also often made a point of calling the country’s Arab citizens “non-Jews” rather than Arabs. And now we are at the point that he is meeting with the head of the alliance of all four Israeli Arab parties in the Knesset to discuss coalition negotiations.