Israel election double standard: Arab leader forced out, far right cleared

A prominent Palestinian Israeli politician has been forced to withdraw from the upcoming elections over his remarks about the Gaza war, while Israeli far-right leaders have remained untouched despite their incendiary rhetoric and calls for violence against Palestinians.

The Israeli political institutions, including the electoral body, have been accused of double standards for targeting Palestinian politicians and parties in Israel.

Sami Abu Shehadeh, the leader of the Balad party, withdrew his candidacy after the Supreme Court warned he could be disqualified from the race. He has described the decision to disqualify him from the upcoming elections as “a historical catastrophe for democracy”.

That court advisory came after Israel’s central elections committee barred him from running over comments he made about the war on Gaza.

The election, set for October 27, has renewed scrutiny of the challenges faced by Palestinian citizens of Israel seeking political representation.

Experts and critics, including Palestinian rights groups, have accused electoral system staff of applying a double standard in which Arab candidates have faced attempts to remove them from the ballot, while far-right Israeli politicians accused of repeatedly inciting violence against Palestinians have been allowed to run.

“It’s always been the case whether the Israeli political system, the political elite, has always designed the political system in a way to ensure that it’s a Zionist state, not just or even a Jewish state,” Zaidon Alkinani, founding director of the Arab Perspectives Institute, told Al Jazeera.

So, what happened, and what does the controversy say about Palestinian participation in Israeli elections?

Who is Sami Abu Shehadeh?

Abu Shehadeh is a historian from Jaffa and the leader of Balad, a Palestinian nationalist party that advocates equal rights for all citizens of Israel. He served in the Knesset from 2019 until 2022.

His candidacy was challenged by far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir over an article published on October 8, 2023, the day after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel, which he described as “an important historical event”.

Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara backed his disqualification, arguing the wording could amount to support for armed struggle.

Abu Shehadeh, speaking at the Supreme Court on Thursday, said he did not support “armed struggle”, but acknowledged that a paragraph in the article had been incorrectly worded. The Balad leader said his intention was to urge moving the conflict towards a political process.

What was the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision?

Last month, the Central Elections Committee voted to bar Abu Shehadeh, Hadash politician Ofer Cassif and the two main Arab-majority electoral lists – the Joint List, which includes Balad, Hadash and Ta’al, and Ra’am, or the United Arab List.

The Supreme Court overturned the bans on the two lists and Cassif.

Cassif is a politician from the left-wing, Arab-majority Hadash-Ta’al party. In the late 1980s, the pro-Palestinian Israeli spent time in jail for refusing to serve as a soldier in the occupied territories.

He claimed in 2021 that police beat him while he participated in a protest against an illegal Jewish settlement in occupied East Jerusalem.

Abu Shehadeh accused the Supreme Court of bowing to pressure from Ben-Gvir and questioned how a politician he accused of promoting violence and displacement against Palestinians could seek his exclusion from the election.

“Someone [Ben-Gvir] who was calling for starving people to death in Gaza, for preventing medicine, water and food, and supports the occupation and ethnic cleansing in the [occupied] West Bank … was able to disqualify me, a human rights activist for three decades,” Abu Shehadeh told Al Jazeera.

Adalah, the legal rights group representing him, called his withdrawal “a severe blow” to Palestinian citizens’ right to political representation.

“This entire process was a deliberate attempt to delegitimise Palestinian citizens and their parliamentary representatives and to turn racism against Palestinians into election propaganda,” it said in a media statement.

Have Israeli leaders used incendiary language?

Before the Supreme Court hearings, petitions were also submitted seeking to disqualify the parties of Ben-Gvir and that of another far-right cabinet member, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

The Central Elections Committee rejected those petitions, leaving both parties on the ballot.

Section 7A of Israel’s Basic Law on the Knesset provides the legal grounds for barring candidates or electoral lists, including rejecting Israel’s character as a “Jewish and democratic state”, promoting racism, or backing an armed campaign against Israel by a hostile state or a designated “terrorist” group.

Attorney General Baharav-Miara found that the attempts to exclude the far-right parties lacked sufficient legal basis.

Ben-Gvir and Smotrich have repeatedly faced international backlash over their incendiary rhetoric towards Palestinians. In 2025, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Norway imposed sanctions on both ministers, accusing them of repeatedly inciting violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

More recently, Ben-Gvir proposed a seven-year plan for Palestinians to leave Gaza through what he called “voluntary emigration”.

“Instead of illusions of peace now, we need actions of emigration now,” he said in September. “Instead of [them] digging tunnels, it’s time to pack suitcases.”

Smotrich has also advocated the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza and annexation of the occupied West Bank. Both he and Ben-Gvir have called for the permanent takeover of Gaza and re-establishment of Jewish settlements there, proposals Netanyahu has rejected.

Why are there accusations of a double standard?

The different treatment of Abu Shehadeh and Israel’s far-right politicians has led Palestinian politicians and experts to accuse the electoral system of applying a double standard.

Palestinian political analyst and playwright Ahmed Najjar told Al Jazeera that Abu Shehadeh’s case exposed what he described as the “two-tier nature of Israeli democracy”.

“This is not the equal application of the law,” he said. “It establishes one threshold for Jewish Israeli politicians and another for Palestinian citizens of Israel.”

Najjar pointed to the contrast between the court’s treatment of Abu Shehadeh’s October 2023 article and the continued eligibility of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, despite inflammatory statements attributed to the two far-right politicians.

“Jewish extremism can be accommodated within Israel’s political system,” Najjar argued, “while Palestinian political speech is treated as an existential threat”.

“A democracy that selectively excludes Palestinian representatives cannot credibly call itself democratic.”

Alkinani, founding director of the Arab Perspectives Institute, argued the controversy reflected a wider problem facing Palestinian political participation rather than an isolated dispute over one candidate.

He told Al Jazeera that Israel’s political system had historically been structured to preserve its Zionist character, creating particular “intimidation” and “pressures” for Palestinian citizens seeking political representation.

Alkinani said those pressures had intensified since October 7, 2023, which he argued had given a “powerful symbolic push and confidence” to right-wing nationalist parties.

What are the difficulties facing Palestinians in Israeli elections?

Attempts to exclude Palestinian-led parties are not new.

Adalah has documented challenges to Arab candidates or lists in elections in 2003, 2013, 2015, 2020 and 2022. The Supreme Court has repeatedly overturned decisions by the Central Elections Committee, whose voting members are representatives of parties in the outgoing Knesset.

Palestinian citizens of Israel account for roughly 20 percent of the population, yet their turnout at the polls has traditionally been lower than that of Jewish Israelis.

Parties must also secure at least 3.25 percent of the national vote to enter parliament, encouraging smaller Arab parties to form joint lists to avoid losing representation altogether.

Arab Perspectives Institute’s Alkinani says the issue extended beyond Israel’s far right. Some parties considered centrist on domestic Israeli issues, he said, still supported “hawkish security actions towards the Palestinians”.