Israeli court to review disqualification of candidates and Joint List — Jerusalem Post
Israel’s Supreme Court will on Thursday review the decision to bar Balad party chairman Sami Abu Shahadeh, Knesset member Ofer Cassif and the Joint List alliance from the elections. The vote is due to take place on October 27. Participants in a briefing in Jaffa said that the campaign surrounding these cases could intimidate Arab voters and reduce their turnout, the Jerusalem Post reports.
Election Commission decisions
The cases will be heard by a panel of nine judges. First, the court will review the Central Elections Committee’s decision regarding Abu Shahadeh, as this is a required procedure for the final disqualification of an individual candidate. The judges will then consider Cassif’s disqualification and the appeal against the ban on the Joint List’s participation.
The committee voted 19 to five to bar Cassif, while two other representatives abstained. The decision on the Joint List was supported by 18 representatives, with five against and one abstention. The committee disqualified Abu Shahadeh by 30 votes to four, and the committee chairman, Justice Noam Sohlberg, also backed the decision, bringing the overall result to 31 to four.
The committee also barred the Ra’am party, which is running separately from the Joint List, from standing in the election. However, this decision is not among the cases scheduled to be heard on Thursday.
Positions of the parties and security concerns
Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara opposed the disqualification of Cassif and the Joint List, stating that the evidence does not meet the strict legal threshold. Her position on Abu Shahadeh was tougher: representatives of her office said that the submitted materials provide grounds for seeking his disqualification.
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Likud’s petition against Cassif concerns his statements and political activity which, according to the petitioners, deny Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state and support armed struggle. Cassif and the Adalah legal center argued that international political or legal pressure on Israel cannot be equated with supporting armed struggle.
The petition by the Otzma Yehudit party against Abu Shahadeh is based, among other things, on his article of October 7, 2023, published the following day. The politician said that he wrote it before the scale of the mass killing became known, that the material should not have been published and did not constitute support for the attack. He also said that he had repeatedly condemned the attack.
Lawyers, politicians and academics at the briefing expressed concern that rhetoric surrounding the disqualification of candidates could convince Arab citizens that voting is futile. They also warned of the risk of intimidation near polling stations and possible physical violence. In April 2019, Likud deployed more than a thousand observers with hidden cameras at polling stations in Arab communities, after which the election commission banned parties from systematically using cameras inside polling stations.
The legal dispute concerns Article 7A of the Basic Law: The Knesset. It allows a candidate or list to be disqualified for denying Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state, inciting racism, or supporting the armed struggle of an enemy state or terrorist organization against Israel. Under Supreme Court case law, such a decision requires clear, convincing and unambiguous evidence of a consistent position, rather than an isolated statement.
