Even before his 100 days of grace come to an end, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has made it into Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of 2021. Bennett is not the first Israeli premier to make the list, nor the last. What makes this achievement special is the man who wrote the magazine’s tribute to the Israeli leader, Islamist Knesset member Mansour Abbas, whose Ra’am party is the first Arab party to ever participate actively in an Israeli government.

Even if this remains the only achievement of the government that Bennett formed against all odds, it is still a stunning historic event. An Arab-Israeli party has never joined a government coalition in all of Israel’s 73 years. The 21% Arab minority enjoys equal rights de jure, but had been excluded from the center of the political map until three months ago. The exclusion was mutual — Arab political parties were not only boycotted, they also boycotted the predominantly Jewish ones. This is no longer the case.

The credit for this development goes to three people. First and foremost to Mansour Abbas, who has set aside national/nationalistic issues such as the Palestinian issue to devote himself to the matters most important to the daily lives of his constituents. The second person is Bennett, who recognized the historic opportunity facing him and rose to the occasion. The third, paradoxically, is former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the months leading up to the formation of the Bennett government, Netanyahu embarked on a sizzling political affair with Abbas, including four face-to-face meetings at the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem. Netanyahu prepared the hearts and minds of his supporters for the inclusion of an Arab party, and an Islamist one, at that, in a future coalition, but ultimately failed to put it together. Bennett succeeded where Netanyahu failed.

Just six years ago, while serving as minister of education, Bennett asked his driver to stop next to an olive tree near the Israeli-Arab town of Kafr Qasem. He got out of the car, took down some green flags covered in Arabic script that were hanging on the tree and posted a photo of his action on social media. Bennett was hailed as a hero. He had been returning from a condolence call at the West Bank settlement home of an Israeli couple murdered by Hamas in front of their children. Bennett was convinced he was removing Hamas flags from the olive tree, only to find out later that they were in fact the flags of the southern faction of Israel’s Islamist party. In any case, he would never have dreamed that six years on he would be prime minister and the Ra’am party whose flags he had unintentionally removed would be a full-fledged member of his government. In other words, in 2015, Bennett did not know the difference between Hamas and Ra’am. He does now.