Israeli Politics · updated 1h ago · 3 min read
Israel Central Elections Committee Disqualifies Ra’am, Joint Arab List, Ofer Cassif, Sami Abu Shehadeh
Israel's Central Elections Committee disqualified Ra’am and the Joint List from October 27 Knesset election. Sami Abu Shehadeh and Ofer Cassif were barred from running.
Whether opposition rivals deliberately prefer losing.
2 of 3 outlets skipped it: lieberman reverses course and supports disqualifying Ra’am and the Joint List..
Ynetnews was read line by line by the Watchdog: 5.2. See the score →
18outlets compared
Same story, two versions
tap a side to read it in full
Haaretz
“many in the anti-Netanyahu opposition would prefer to lose the upcoming election”Read the original ↗
The Jerusalem Post
“The decisions do not automatically go to the Supreme Court for scrutiny, because they concern entire candidate lists rather than individual candidates.”Read the original ↗
Haaretz frames the issue as rivals preferring defeat, while other outlets focus on committee votes and Supreme Court standards.
Disqualifications Set Up Court Fight
Israel’s Central Elections Committee disqualified Ra’am, the Joint Arab List, and specific candidates including MK Ofer Cassif and Balad chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh from running in the October 27 election for the 26th Knesset. Justice Noam Sohlberg chaired the Central Elections Committee when the committee backed the disqualification of Sami Abu Shehadeh, and the High Court of Justice was expected to overturn the decision and allow Ra’am and the Joint Arab List to participate. Al Jazeera reported that the Supreme Court must approve the committee’s decisions and that the court had overturned most such disqualifications in previous elections.
The committee’s disqualification vote for the lists was described as a margin of 18 to 5, with one member abstaining in the case of Ra’am, according to The Jerusalem Post as cited by سكاي نيوز عربية. TThe committee also voted to disqualify the Joint List and bar its candidates, setting up a Supreme Court fight over whether the slates can appear on the ballot.
Competing Claims and Quotes
Sami Abu Shehadeh told Alaraby TV that the Election Committee that decided to remove him was not targeting him alone, but sought to erase the voice of an entire community and exclude it from the political arena. Abu Shehadeh added, "We will not be intimidated by attempts at exclusion, and we will not be driven to retreat," as he said he would go to the Supreme Court to defend the Arab public’s right to representation. Adalah director Hassan Jabareen argued that the claim Abu Shehadeh supported armed struggle contradicted his decades of public and parliamentary activity, and he said the article cited by petitioners contained no call for violence.
The Central Elections Committee’s disqualification petition against Abu Shehadeh was filed by Itamar Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party and cited an article Abu Shehadeh published a day after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack in southern Israel. The committee’s decision against Abu Shehadeh was also described as a move that would be reviewed by the Supreme Court, which had overturned most similar disqualifications in previous elections.
What Is at Stake Next
The disqualification fight centered on Article 7A of the Basic Law: The Knesset, which allows a party list or a candidate to be barred under conditions including denial of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and support for armed struggle by a hostile state or organization designated as terrorist by Israel. The committee’s upcoming legal battle was framed by the Supreme Court’s approach of construing Article 7A narrowly and requiring a high evidentiary threshold, with the court requiring clear evidence that a prohibited objective is a central and dominant element of a list’s activity. i24NEWS said the Supreme Court would have the final say on whether Ra’am and the Joint List appear on the ballot, and it described the court as expected to hear election disqualification cases next week.
Adalah said the disqualification decision prevented a list representing a broad segment of the Arab public from participating and warned that the disqualification request did not present the "block of compelling evidence" required under Supreme Court provisions. The stakes were also described in terms of representation, with Al-Jazirah Net saying excluding full slates representing more than 1,250,000 voters was a direct assault on democracy and that the fate of the Joint and Unified Lists would remain on hold until the Supreme Court rules.