Israeli Politics02 October, 20262 min read
Sami Abu Shehadeh Withdraws From Israel’s October 27 Elections After Supreme Court Pressure
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Sami Abu Shehadeh withdrew from Oct 27 Knesset race after Supreme Court signaled disqualification. Court majority supported disqualification; judges urged withdrawal to avoid ban.
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Balad leader exits race
Sami Abu Shehadeh, president of the Arab nationalist Balad party, withdrew his candidacy for Israel’s October 27 elections after the Supreme Court advised him to drop out. The Supreme Court’s pressure followed a September 23 decision by Israel’s Central Elections Committee to oust him from the race, after nationalist political rivals accused him of supporting Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023.
Abu Shehadeh told the Supreme Court he did not support “armed struggle” but acknowledged that a paragraph in the article had been incorrectly worded, while the elections committee had acted at the request of far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. Adalah condemned the court’s move, saying, “The court has effectively decided to remove a Palestinian leader, a citizen of Israel, from the Knesset,” and it warned the court’s intention would set “a dangerous legal precedent with devastating consequences.”
Court, evidence, and reversals
The Israeli Supreme Court reintroduced the two Arab lists and Knesset member Ofer Kasif, overturning Central Election Committee decisions, while Sami Abu Shhadeh became the sole candidate to exit the race after his withdrawal. The October 2 decision described a gap between the committee’s decisions and the standard applied by the court, because the nine judges allowed the Joint List and the United Arab List to participate unanimously while a majority of seven judges to two quashed Kasif’s disqualification.
CNN Arabic said the Supreme Court unanimously approved the nomination of the two main political parties led by Arab figures, namely the Unified Arab List (Ra’am) and the Joint List, for the October 27 elections, overturning the committee’s earlier bar. Balad announced it withdrew Abu-Chahdeh’s nomination “out of political responsibility, after it became clear that the majority of judges lean toward approving the exclusion,” and the party framed the case as raising “difficult questions about the limits of the political legitimacy granted to Arab citizens.”
What the shift changes
The Supreme Court’s reinstatement of Arab parties set up a political landscape in which Arab lists could become decisive for forming a government after the end-of-October vote. DIE WELT said the court overturned a Central Election Committee decision that had sought to exclude Arab parties, and it reported that the committee voted 18 to 5 against Ra’am led by Mansur Abbas and against the joint list of Chadash, Ta'al, and Balad.
DIE WELT also said polls place Arab parties together at around twelve mandates and that the condition for them to be decisive is that the parties overcome the threshold of 3.25 percent in the October 27 election. DIE WELT added that Netanyahu and several potential coalition partners still rule out joining a government with Arab parties, and it said a deadlock could allow Ra’am to support a government from the outside without being a coalition member, while the convergence between Abbas and Joav Segalovitz was framed as an attempt to facilitate political cooperation between Jewish and Arab camps.