Election committee votes to bar Joint List MK Ofer Cassif from running

By Ariela Karmel

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Ariela 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.

MK Ofer Cassif speaks during a vote at the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee meeting at the Knesset, on March 12, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

The Central Elections Committee votes 19-5 to disqualify Joint List MK Ofer Cassif from running in the October 27 election, approving a petition filed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.

The petition sought to bar Cassif under a provision of Basic Law: The Knesset prohibiting candidates who negate Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state. It was backed by opposition parties Benny Gantz’s Blue and White and Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu.

A member of the Hadash faction, which is running as part of the Joint List alliance with the Arab-majority Ta’al and Balad parties, Cassif is No. 6 on the Joint List slate and among its only Jewish candidates.

The disqualification was widely expected, given the politicized nature of the committee, which is made up of representatives of Knesset parties.

The ruling must be approved by the Supreme Court before Cassif can be barred and is unlikely to be upheld given the court’s historically high threshold for disqualification. The court overturned a CEC decision barring Cassif from running in 2019.

“The committee is political and I had no expectations from it,” Cassif says following the vote, according to the Kan public broadcaster, adding that he is “convinced that the Supreme Court will overturn the decision.”

Cassif, one of the Knesset’s most vocal critics of the war in Gaza, rejected the allegations during the hearing as “politically motivated” and called the portrayal of his opposition to government policy as “support for the enemy, disloyalty and harm to the state” a “blatant distortion of reality.”

“My public duty is not to the government and its lackeys, or to the ruling hegemony, but to ensure that our sons and daughters live in justice and peace and are not pushed, amid mutterings of necessity and revenge, into war crimes,” he said.

By doing so, he was “serving society more faithfully, humanely, democratically and Jewishly than any of the signatories to this foolish disqualification petition,” he added.