After a busy few days, Israel’s Central Elections Committee has concluded hearings on motions to disqualify politicians and political parties from the coming elections.
As with so much recent news from the country, the committee’s decisions are another clear sign of how successful, perhaps unstoppable, Israel’s far right has become.
Only Arab politicians, and one far-left Jewish politician, have been banned. Coalition parties, whose leaders regularly call for the total destruction and resettlement of Gaza, have been conclusively let off the hook. So has a Zionist centre-left party, The Democrats. Much of Israel's opposition supported the bans, despite the Arab bloc potentially being crucial to forming an opposition government.
Many of the Arab politicians banned by the CEC had served in Israel's previous government, a broad coalition which at the time inspired some hope that Israelis across the political spectrum could work together.
And so, as things stand, far-left Jewish politician Ofer Cassif and Palestinian-Israeli politician Sami Abu Shehadeh will not run in the election. Nor will the party slates of the United Arab List and Joint List. They have been barred on various grounds, including accusations that the parties reject Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, support armed struggle against Israel, and incite racism. All of the banned parties reject the grounds for their disqualification.
Israel’s Supreme Court could overrule the committee’s decisions in hearings that are expected to take place next week. Some believe the court will quash the bans. However, the case against Mr Abu Shehadeh was backed by a Supreme Court judge on the CEC and the attorney general in a moment of unusually broad consensus. It was unusual because legal figures are frequently vilified by Israel’s far-right, who brought the motions to the CEC this week.
The rest of the CEC reflects the political make-up of the current parliament, giving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ultranationalist coalition a majority. The Supreme Court will be under intense pressure during next week’s hearings, given the coalition’s ongoing efforts to weaken the judiciary, which it accuses of being against democracy.
Adalah, an Israeli legal and human rights organisation, said the hearings were “an arbitrary, inciting and racist process, devoid of any legal process”.
“The CEC conducted an illegitimate political process aimed at persecuting ideas the majority does not accept, and it ended with the disqualification of all Palestinian representation in the Israeli Knesset,” it added.
Speaking to The National before he was banned, Mr Cassif, a member of the far-left Hadash party, said: “What the fascists want to do, and unfortunately will face no opposition in doing so, is to silence any alternative voice to their own fascist way, especially the Arab voice.”
“The fascist right knows that if it succeeds in expelling the Arab parties it will be ruling literally forever. Without our representation in the Knesset, there’s no chance for the so-called ‘moderate’ opposition,” he added.
“If the justices behave according to the law and are not biased by the political views of the hegemonic public discourse, there’s no way we’ll be disqualified in the end.”
A petition to disqualify National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party, which was rejected, argued that it was born from the Kach movement, which had been banned on grounds of inciting racism, and that its members deny the democratic rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel.
The CEC also rejected a petition to ban Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s ultranationalist Religious Zionism party.
