Right-wing parties seek to bar MK Zoabi from elections

Right-wing parties applied Thursday to the Central Election Committee with a request to disqualify the controversial Arab Israeli Knesset member Hanin Zoabi from running in the elections in March.

Zoabi has already been sanctioned over past statements that were deemed inflammatory. A six-month ban against her participating in Knesset debates expired on Thursday.

All Knesset parties are required to submit their final Knesset lists by Thursday at 10 p.m.

In a statement, MK Alex Miller of the right-wing Yisrael Beytenu party, the deputy chairman of the elections committee, claimed that banning Zoabi is in accordance with the constitutional Basic Law:The Knesset that disqualifies parliamentary candidates who reject Israel as a Jewish and democratic state or promote terrorism.

The request was backed by the rest of Yisrael Beytenu, along with the Likud and Shas parties, which are working together to prevent Zoabi from running.

“I am excited to announce the agreement that has been reached by factions of the nationalist camp to disqualify MK Zoabi, who has time and again come out against the IDF and Israel, and who expresses her support of the biggest enemies of the State of Israel,” Miller said.

Zoabi, a member of the Balad party and now running with the newly unified Arab party, is an outspoken critic of Israel who first came under fire for taking part in the Mavi Marmara flotilla to Gaza in 2010. More recently, she refused to label as “terrorists” the men who abducted three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank and set off a chain of events that culminated in the Gaza war.

“Is it strange that people living under occupation and living impossible lives, in a situation where Israel kidnaps new prisoners every day, is it strange that they kidnap? They are not terrorists,” she said in a radio interview after the abduction of the teens, before it became evident that they had been killed. She was also accused of inciting violence against Arab police officers during a demonstration in Nazareth.

Zoabi’s statements predictably incensed many Knesset members and resulted in the Knesset Ethics Committee banning her from speaking before the Knesset and Knesset committees for six months. Her attempt to have the suspension overturned by the High Court of Justice failed. Justice Salim Jubran, who is the current head of the election committee, told Haaretz at the time that Zoabi’s statements were “very difficult.”

In the lead-up to the 2013 elections, MK Ofir Akunis of the Likud party tried to disqualify Zoabi from running on the basis of her participation in the flotilla. The election committee accepted Akunis’s request and banned Zoabi from running, but the decision was swiftly and unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court.

Likud MK Danny Danon tried to pass through the Knesset new legislation in February 2013 that would make it more difficult for the Supreme Court to overrule election committee decisions, but the measure was struck down.

Zoabi did not take the 2013 attempt to bar her from running in the elections lightly, calling those responsible “fascists.”

She responded to the most recent attempt with equal zeal, saying it stemmed from racism “that needs to be outside of the law” and adding that she would not deign “to respond to Knesset members from parties afflicted with corruption, which will seemingly disappear from the political map in the coming elections.”

Zoabi was referring to a massive, ongoing investigation against multiple top Yisrael Beytenu members as well as a raft of public officials that has seen the party, led by Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, dip precariously close to the electoral threshold in recent polls.