Israel bans Arab parties from election: Who they are, why it matters

Israel’s Central Elections Committee has voted to bar the country’s two main Arab-majority political lists from next month’s parliamentary election, potentially leaving Palestinian citizens of Israel without their principal representatives in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset.

The committee also voted to disqualify Ofer Cassif, a Jewish politician from the Arab-Jewish Hadash party, and Sami Abu Shehadeh, the leader of the Palestinian nationalist Balad party.

The votes are not the final word on who can run in the October 27 election. The Supreme Court is expected to review the decisions next week and has overturned previous attempts to exclude Arab parties and candidates.

But the committee’s decision has already prompted accusations of double standards, with Palestinian-led parties facing exclusion while parties led by far-right ministers, some of whom have been sanctioned internationally, remaining on the ballot. Here is what the decision means.

Which parties have been barred?

The committee voted to disqualify two separate groups. The first is the Joint List, an alliance of Hadash, Balad and Ta’al. The second is Ra’am, also called the United Arab List, which is running on its own. Both rely on support from Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up about one-fifth of the country’s population.

The Joint List

This brings together three parties. Hadash is a left-wing party with Jewish and Arab members, Ta’al campaigns primarily for the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Balad calls for a state with equal rights for all its citizens. They agreed to contest this election on a single list, meaning their candidates would appear together on the ballot.

It is an electoral tactic used to not split votes among parties that are similar ideologically. A list must also win at least 3.25 percent of the national vote to enter the Knesset, so by joining forces, smaller parties combine their votes and reduce the risk that each falls below the threshold – in which case none of them would win seats.

In the current 120-seat Knesset, the Hadash-Ta’al alliance holds five seats. Of the Hadash-Ta’al seats, three belong to Hadash politicians and two to Ta’al. Balad has no seats.

Ra’am

Led by Mansour Abbas, it is running separately. It has been more willing to negotiate with other parties over funding and services for Arab communities. Ra’am joined the broad coalition that governed Israel from 2021 to 2022. The Joint List did not join that government.

In the current Knesset, Ra’am holds five seats.

Why have these parties been barred?

The decision followed petitions by the right-wing parties, Likud and Otzma Yehudit, which accused the parties and candidates of denying Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state, supporting armed struggle against Israel or inciting racism.

The committee is chaired by a Supreme Court justice, but its voting members represent parties in the outgoing Knesset. Politicians therefore vote on whether rival parties and candidates can contest the election, although the Supreme Court has the final say.

The committee voted 18-5 to bar Ra’am and, in a separate vote, 18-5 to bar the Joint List. It also voted 18-5 to bar Cassif and 31-4 to bar Abu Shehadeh, according to Adalah, the Palestinian legal rights group representing the lists and candidates.

Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara opposed the disqualification of the two lists and Cassif, saying the evidence did not meet the legal threshold. She took a different position on Abu Shehadeh, however. The case against him centres in part on an article he wrote on October 8, 2023, the day after Hamas’s attacks on Israel.

The article was published on the Arab 48 website and referred to the attack as “an important historic event militarily, politically and strategically”.

The attorney general claimed its wording could amount to support for armed struggle.

Abu Shehadeh rejects that reading. He said on X that he opposed armed struggle and supported a “political and civil struggle for peace, justice, and equality”.

Other opposition parties in Israel support the disqualification of Abu Shehadeh. Yair Golan, leader of the opposition Democrats party, said of Abu Shehadeh: “Whoever wants a Jewish-Arab partnership does not speak this way, period,” he said, calling any legitimacy given to armed struggle or harm to civilians “a red line”.

Adalah disputes the case against Abu Shehadeh. It says the article contains no call for violence and argues that the petitions against the Joint List largely rely on old material or positions previously examined by the courts. It plans to challenge the decisions in the Supreme Court.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, remains eligible to run, despite being the subject of an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, and a corruption trial that began in 2020 and remains ongoing. Netanyahu denies the allegations against him.

Cassif, whose disqualification from a previous election was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2019, called Wednesday’s decisions “another nail in the coffin of the remnants of democracy” in Israel. He said he and the Joint List would be in the next Knesset.

Attempts to exclude Arab candidates are not new. Adalah has documented challenges in elections in 2003, 2013, 2015, 2020 and 2022. The Supreme Court has repeatedly reversed committee decisions, but that history offers no guarantee of what it will do this time.

What about the far right?

Petitions which sought to disqualify the two far-right ministers in Netanyahu’s cabinet, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party, were rejected by the election committee.

Ben-Gvir and Smotrich have both advocated the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza and the annexation of the occupied West Bank, and face international sanctions over their actions and rhetoric towards Palestinians.

Attorney General Baharav-Miara, who has repeatedly clashed with Netanyahu’s government, said the bids to bar the far-right parties lacked a legal basis, according to Haaretz. However, for his part, Golan has said he supported disqualifying Ben-Gvir as well.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, remains eligible to run, despite an International Criminal Court arrest warrant over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, and a corruption trial that began in 2020 and remains ongoing. Netanyahu denies the allegations against him.

Human rights advocate Ubai Al-Aboudi condemned the decision. The committee, he told Al Jazeera, has decided “not to bar Israeli politicians, parties or lists that are openly calling for the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians”.

“It has not even decided to view their statements as extreme.

“This shows that the current Israeli political structure still views Palestinians as a demographic threat, is still vilifying Palestinians.”

What happens now?

About one-fifth of Israel’s population is Palestinian. If the Supreme Court upholds the votes against both Ra’am and the Joint List, voters could still cast ballots for other parties, but neither of the two main Arab-majority lists would be able to contest the election. The court will also decide whether Cassif and Abu Shehadeh can stand.

Al-Aboudi said earlier attempts to bar Arab representatives had been overturned, but this vote went further. “It is the first time that all representation has been barred,” he said, describing it as a sign of “the mentality and extremism of the current Israeli political structure”.

The final decision rests with the Supreme Court. Al-Aboudi said its past rulings offer some grounds for hope, but added that, given the present political atmosphere, it is unclear whether it would overturn “part, all or none” of the committee’s decisions.