Election panel rejects bids to bar Democrats, Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionism parties

The Central Elections Committee on Thursday rejected bids to disqualify The Democrats party and the Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionism-Zehut slates from the October 27 election, concluding two days of hearings on petitions seeking to bar parties and individual candidates from the race.

The results left all of the Jewish-majority parties challenged before the committee eligible to run, in contrast to its decisions a day earlier to disqualify the Arab-majority slates, Ra’am and the Joint List, as well as two Joint List candidates.

The parties of the current hard-right coalition have a majority on the CEC, and most of the panel’s disqualifications are expected to be overturned by the Supreme Court.

The CEC voted 14-2 against disqualifying Yair Golan’s left-wing Democrats party from running in the October 27 election, rejecting a petition filed by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit party.

It also voted 19-10 against petitions filed by The Democrats and the Zulat Institute for Equality and Human Rights to disqualify Otzma Yehudit, and 21-3 against a separate Zulat petition to bar Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party, which is running on a joint slate with Moshe Feiglin’s Zehut.

The petitions against all three slates cited provisions of Basic Law: The Knesset, which prohibit parties and candidates that negate Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state or incite racism.

During the hearing to bar Otzma Yehudit, The Democrats MK Gilad Kariv pointed to Ben Gvir’s 2007 convictions for incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization, declaring: “Ben Gvir is not a right-wing Zionist; he is a racist Kahanist.”

He pointed to Ben Gvir telling Arab residents of East Jerusalem that “I am your landlord”; Otzma Yehudit minister Amichay Eliyahu suggesting dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza; the portrait of Jewish terrorist Baruch Goldstein that formerly hung in Ben Gvir’s home; and Otzma Yehudit’s lawmakers’ participation in annual memorials for late racist rabbi Meir Kahane, whose Kach party was banned as a terror organization, and of whom Ben Gvir is a self-described disciple, though he has sought to distance himself from his legacy in recent years.

The CEC is headed by a Supreme Court justice but is composed largely of representatives of Knesset factions, with the coalition holding a majority, making its decisions highly partisan.

Its decisions to disqualify individual candidates are subject to Supreme Court approval, while decisions concerning entire party slates can be petitioned against at the top court, which has overturned many such disqualifications in the past.

Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara had determined ahead of the hearings that there was no legal basis for disqualifying any of the three parties.

The decisions came a day after the committee voted to disqualify Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am party and the Joint List — an alliance of Hadash, Ta’al and Balad — effectively barring all major Arab parties from the election. It also disqualified Hadash MK Ofer Cassif and Balad chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh.

The Supreme Court is due to review the disqualifications next week, with most expected to be struck down given the court’s historically high bar for excluding parties and candidates from elections.

Abu Shehadeh’s case is less certain, however. Baharav-Miara backed his disqualification over an article he wrote a day after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack that she said appeared to express support for armed struggle against Israel. Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, who chairs the CEC, and all opposition parties also took the unusual step of voting to disqualify him.

The rights group Adalah, which is representing Abu Shehadeh, the Joint List and Ra’am, has accused the attorney general of applying a more stringent standard to Arab candidates than to Ben Gvir and Smotrich, who have both made repeated inflammatory remarks.

Among other things, Ben Gvir said in August that Israel should kill “30 to 40” people in Gaza every night, including individuals who posed no immediate threat, saying some were “not worthy of life” and “not even people,” while Smotrich said last year that Gaza would be “totally destroyed,” previously called for the Palestinian town of Huwara to be “wiped out,” and said in 2024 that causing two million Gazan civilians to die of hunger unless the hostages were returned “might be justified and moral.”

In its own petition, Otzma Yehudit cited remarks made by Golan in May 2025 in which he said that a “sane country” does not “kill babies as a hobby” in Gaza — remarks he later said were directed at the government rather than the IDF and did not mean that Israel was actually killing children for sport — as well as The Democrats candidate Omri Ronen saying that Israelis should be prepared to refuse to perform military service to prevent what he described as a government “coup d’état.”