AG: Disqualification of Balad leader from election ‘should be seriously considered’

Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara and State Attorney Amit Aisman told the Central Elections Committee (CEC) on Tuesday that an article written by Sami Abou Shahadeh, the head of the radical Balad party, a day after the October 7, 2023, massacre, expressed support for armed struggle by terror groups against the State of Israel.

The two senior legal figures said that the Central Elections Committee should therefore “seriously consider” a request by far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party to disqualify Abou Shahadeh from running for Knesset, “in accordance with the legal criteria and in light of Abou Shahadeh’s arguments before the committee.”

They added that Abou Shahadeh’s responses to the accusations against him “do not allay concern that his article reflected an expression of support for armed struggle against Israel, at the worst possible timing.”

Basic Law: The Knesset explicitly prohibits anyone expressing support for armed struggle against the State of Israel from running for Knesset.

Any decision by the CEC to disqualify Shahadeh or other individual candidates requires the approval of the Supreme Court, which has historically struck down such decisions. However, the backing of the attorney general and state attorney for disqualification could make the court more likely to uphold a decision barring the Balad leader from running.

In their legal opinion paper, Baharav-Miara and Aisman focused on an article published by Shahadeh on an Arabic-language website on October 8, 2023, about the massive armed invasion of Israel that took place the day prior.

Calling the invasion the “Al-Aqsa Flood operation” (as it had been dubbed by Hamas), Shahadeh wrote that “this is a historic event of significant military, political, and strategic importance.”

He said that the attack was “entirely consistent with a law of physics we all know: that great pressure leads to explosion,” in reference to what he termed “decades of occupation, siege,” and other alleged misdeeds by Israel.

In a key sentence, Abou Shahadeh wrote that Israel’s intelligence services “are human beings like us” and that “it is possible to prevent them from penetrating our countries, our parties, and our political movements — provided there is the will and we organize in the right way.”

“If the small, besieged Gaza managed to do this, and at this level, then others can do so more effectively and easily,” he continued.

The Balad leader also referred to the “diplomatic fruits of this operation,” saying that, following the war, the “resistance” should extend to the PLO and friendly Arab states “in order to attain the desired achievements.”

Baharav-Miara and Aisman wrote that Shahadeh’s article showed “sympathetic treatment, without a word of condemnation, for the ‘operation’ while focusing on its achievements and the political fruits that could be reaped from it.”

They highlighted Abou Shehadeh’s comments about Hamas’s success in preventing the Israeli intelligence services from infiltrating Arab organizations, and argued that it sounded like a call to the Arab world to replicate what the terror group had accomplished.

“[The article] includes a series of statements that, cumulatively and against the backdrop of the timing of their publication, give the reader of the article the impression that the article’s author is emphasizing the advantages inherent in the historic event of October 7, in the respondent’s words,” Baharav-Miara and Aisman wrote.

Abou Shehadeh has denounced Otzma Yehudit’s attempt to disqualify him as “absurd,” pointing to Ben Gvir’s own 2007 conviction of incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization.

The Balad leader has denied supporting the Hamas attack or political violence and said that he would not have published the article had he known at the time the scale of the atrocities.

“I never called for violence, did not support the events of October 7 and do not justify them,” he said in a post on X last week, insisting that his support for Palestinian rights and opposition to the occupation “were never support for violence or armed struggle.”

In their opinion, Baharav-Miara and Aisman rejected Shahadeh’s claim that he did not know the scope of the Hamas attack when he wrote the article, saying that there was already ample evidence by October 8 that hundreds of people had been killed.

While they acknowledged that Abou Shahadeh had subsequently condemned the harm to civilians, they noted that Basic Law: The Knesset prohibits Knesset candidates from supporting armed struggle against Israel, be it against civilian or military targets.

Opposition parties back disqualification bid

Responding to the attorney general’s opinion, opposition frontrunner Yashar, led by Gadi Eisenkot, and Benny Gantz’s Blue and White announced that they would back Otzma Yehudit’s petition to disqualify Abou Shehadeh.

“Support for the armed struggle of a terrorist organization against Israel is grounds for disqualifying a candidate. In our view, Abou Shehadeh crossed that line,” Yashar said in a statement.

The party said Abou Shehadeh’s subsequent clarification that he did not support the attacks “does not erase what he wrote at the time.”

Blue and White, which has polled below the electoral threshold for months and has not categorically ruled out again serving in a government with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said it would also support a separate petition to disqualify Abou Shehadeh’s Balad party, as well as Likud’s bid to disqualify Hadash MK Ofer Cassif, citing alleged “support for terrorist activity and opposition to the State of Israel as a Jewish state.”

The decisions by Gantz and, in particular, Eisenkot provoked outrage among leaders of the Joint List, the alliance of Hadash, Ta’al and Balad.

“Unfortunately, some of the leaders of the ‘opposition’ have decided to cooperate with the illegitimate attempt to silence the Arab voice at the ballot box,” Abou Shehadeh said.

“Trying to be a pale imitation of the right did not help you before, and it will not help you now,” he said. “Those who claim to be fighting for democracy cannot support the disqualification of the Arab minority’s voice.”

Joint List leader Yousef Jabareen similarly criticized Eisenkot for backing the petition.

“You cannot talk about replacing the right-wing government while at the same time taking part in the campaign to delegitimize representatives of the Arab public,” he said.

“Anyone who supports democracy cannot lend a hand to Otzma Yehudit’s fascist move and its attempt to disqualify a candidate from the Joint List,” Jabareen continued, adding that Eisenkot was “legitimizing” Ben Gvir’s “racist and anti-democratic policies” rather than fighting them.

The Abou Shehadeh case is one of numerous petitions seeking to bar parties and candidates from running in the October 27 election that are set to be debated and voted on by the Central Elections Committee on Wednesday and Thursday, primarily targeting Arab parties and candidates by right-wing parties.

Baharav-Miara and Aisman found no legal basis for other disqualification requests, including three separate petitions to disqualify Mansour Abbas’s Islamist Ra’am party filed by Otzma Yehudit, Likud, and the Choose Life Forum, an organization representing terror victims. Likud is also seeking to disqualify the Joint List in its entirety.

The petitions come as Netanyahu’s bloc remains without a clear path to a 61-seat majority in current polls, while Ra’am could potentially provide the anti-Netanyahu bloc with the seats needed for a majority. Likud has attacked its rivals over the prospect that they may rely on Ra’am, while simultaneously seeking to prevent the party from running.

Separately, Yair Golan’s left-wing Democrats and the Zulat Institute for Equality and Human Rights are seeking to disqualify Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit for denying “the existence of the State of Israel as a democratic state,” and inciting racism, both of which are also prohibited by Basic Law: the Knesset.

Otzma Yehudit, in turn, is seeking to disqualify the Democrats, while Zulat is also seeking to ban Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism joint slate with Moshe Feiglin’s Zehut.

The hearings will be chaired by Deputy Chief Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, who heads the committee. Coalition parties hold 18 of its 31 seats, giving the governing bloc control of the committee’s voting majority.

A committee decision to disqualify individual candidates requires Supreme Court approval, while decisions on party slates can be brought to the court on appeal. The court has historically struck down most disqualifications.