Israel court tells Balad leader to drop election bid — SkimNews
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- Israel's Supreme Court advised Balad leader Sami Abu Shehadeh to withdraw from the October 27 Knesset race by Friday, with Supreme Court President Yitzhak Amit telling him a majority of the nine-justice panel favored disqualification.
- Israel's Central Elections Committee voted last week to bar both main Arab-majority lists — Ra'am and the Joint List (an alliance of Hadash, Ta'al, and Balad) — along with candidates Abu Shehadeh and Hadash legislator Ofer Cassif.
- National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir of Otzma Yehudit appeared in court wearing a lawyer's robe after his party petitioned for the ban, calling Abu Shehadeh a 'supporter of terrorism' who 'belongs in prison, not in the Knesset.'
- Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara backed disqualifying Abu Shehadeh over an article he published the day after October 7, 2023, but opposed barring Cassif and the Joint List, saying the evidence fell short of the legal threshold.
- Abu Shehadeh, a Jaffa historian who served in the Knesset from 2019 to 2022, denied the accusations at the hearing, saying his words 'may have been taken out of context' and that he is 'completely opposed to acts of violence.'
- Israeli affairs expert Shadi al-Sharafa told Al Jazeera this is 'a dangerous precedent that did not exist before' — the first attempt to disqualify all Arab representation rather than a single candidate or list.
- Al Jazeera Arabic bureau chief Walid al-Omari said that if the disqualifications stand, roughly 20 percent of Arab citizens of Israel could be left without Knesset representation.
Why it matters: If the Supreme Court upholds the bans, an estimated 20 percent of Arab citizens of Israel lose their major-party representation in the next Knesset — an unprecedented sweep that political analyst Mairav Zonszein noted is particularly striking for Ra'am, which sat in the Bennett-Lapid coalition. Arab votes could be decisive in a society split between Netanyahu's camp and its opponents, giving the ruling coalition direct incentive to shrink the opposition's potential bloc.
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