Supreme Court unanimously overturns election panel’s ban on Arab parties

The Supreme Court on Friday unanimously overturned the Central Elections Committee’s decision to ban Arab-majority parties Joint List and Ra’am from running in the October 27 election.

The court also ruled 7-2 against the coalition-controlled committee’s decision to ban Joint List MK Ofer Cassif from running.

Separately, CEC chairman Noam Sohlberg, who is also Supreme Court deputy president, on Thursday again found that National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir had violated election law in a video that showed the minister berating a jailed terrorist.

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Under Israeli election law, parties and individual candidates can be barred from running for parliament if they are found to have incited to racism, denied Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state, or expressed support for armed conflict against Israel. All such decisions must be approved by the Supreme Court, as the Central Elections Committee’s members are almost all lawmakers from the various politically motivated Knesset parties.

Contrary to a CEC vote last month, the court found Friday that the aforementioned criteria did not apply to the Joint List, a merger of three majority-Arab parties, or to Ra’am, a historically Islamist party that includes former Yesh Atid MK Yoav Segalovitz and sat in the 2021-2022 “change government.”

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In addition, while all nine justices “object to the outrageous comments and actions” of Cassif, only Justices David Mintz and Alex Stein thought those comments and actions presented a “critical mass” of evidence that Cassif supports armed struggle against the state, the court said.

The CEC had voted last month in favor of motions by right-wing groups, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit, to bar Ra’am, Joint List, Cassif and Sami Abou Shahadeh, head of the Joint List’s nationalist Balad faction.

Abou Shahadeh withdrew his candidacy before Friday’s ruling, after Supreme Court President Isaac Amit told him on Thursday that there was a majority on the bench to bar the former lawmaker from running. Balad said Abou Shahadeh would remain party chief.

Zionist opposition parties, including the left-leaning Democrats, had voted in favor of barring Abou Shahadeh over an article written on October 8, 2023, that purportedly expressed support for the previous day’s Hamas onslaught in southern Israel. Abou Shahadeh has said he regrets writing the article and denied calling for armed struggle against Israel.

MK Avigdor Liberman’s hawkish opposition party Yisrael Beytenu, which also voted to bar Cassif, the Joint List and Ra’am, said after Friday’s ruling that “so long as Abou Shahadeh remains head of Balad and representatives of his party are in the Knesset, a terror organization is being represented in the Knesset. We must outlaw Balad.”

While most heads of the Zionist anti-Netanyahu bloc have said they would not form a government that relies on Arab support, polls indicate they would have no other way of securing a majority in parliament without defectors from Netanyahu’s bloc.

CEC chief orders Ben Gvir to remove video with Hamas inmate

Meanwhile, Sohlberg on Thursday ordered Ben Gvir to remove a video in which the minister, flanked by armed prison guards, told senior Hamas inmate Hassan Salamah, “I want to kill you.”

Salamah is responsible for a pair of 1996 Jerusalem bus bombings that killed 45 people.

Sohlberg ruled in favor of petitioners from two NGOs — Choosing Israel, which advocates for transparency, and the Committee Against Torture — that Ben Gvir “took advantage of his position to produce an election campaign video.”

“Other candidates — and, it seems, other ministers — don’t have the same access to prisons, inmates and jailers. Minister Ben Gvir has the advantage of access to these public assets, and has taken full advantage of it,” Sohlberg said.

Ben Gvir was ordered to take the video down from all social media platforms and to pay a NIS 10,000 ($3,240) fine. His Otzma Yehudit party was ordered to pay an additional NIS 10,000 fine.

The minister has repeatedly been ordered to remove videos under similar circumstances.

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