From Adalah NGO to appeal at Supreme Court against election ban on Arab parties, candidates
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on GoogleAriela Karmel is a political correspondent at The Times of Israel. She previously reported for Calcalist and Haaretz. She holds an MA in Middle Eastern and African History from Tel Aviv University and a BA in Political Science from the University of British Columbia.
Adalah, a legal rights NGO, says it will appeal before the Supreme Court against the Central Elections Committee’s decisions to disqualify all Arab-led parties and several candidates from running in the October 27 election, denouncing the proceedings as an “arbitrary, inciteful and racist process.”
The NGO represented the Joint List, Mansour Abbas’s historically Islamist Ra’am party, Balad chief Sami Abu Shehadeh and Hadash MK Ofer Cassif, all of whom were disqualified by the CEC earlier today. The Supreme Court is due to consider the decisions next week. Cassif is the Joint List’s sole Jewish member.
Adalah says the proceedings amounted to an “illegitimate political process aimed at persecuting ideas the majority does not accept,” arguing that the petitions failed to meet the high evidentiary threshold established by the Supreme Court for disqualification.
The group notes that Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara had previously determined there was no legal basis to disqualify Ra’am, the Joint List or Cassif. The exception was Abu Shehadeh, whose disqualification she said the committee should “seriously consider” over an article he published following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack, making the fate of his case before the Supreme Court less certain. In the article, he described the onslaught a day earlier as “an important historic event militarily, politically and strategically” and wrote that others could learn from Hamas’s success in surprising Israel.
The Joint List, which comprises the Arab-majority Hadash, Ta’al and Balad parties, separately denounces the CEC’s decision to disqualify all Arab parties and disenfranchise “more than one million voters, who make up 20% of the country’s citizens,” and expects the Supreme Court to overturn the decision. The Supreme Court is expected to overturn some of the decisions due to the high bar for banning parties from running.
“Netanyahu and Ben Gvir know that the only way for them to remain in power is by disqualifying Arab political representation and suppressing voter turnout in Arab society,” the bloc charges.
The Times of Israel Community.