Following a dramatic day of heated deliberations, the Central Elections Committee decided today (Wednesday) to disqualify the Joint List from running for the Knesset. The decision was passed with a vote of 18 in favor, five against, and one abstention; it follows decisions made just hours earlier to disqualify the Ra’am party—led by Mansour Abbas—as well as the individual candidacies of MK Ofer Cassif and Balad Chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh. This sweeping series of disqualifications now shifts the focus to a decisive judicial review by the Supreme Court.
The motion to disqualify the Joint List was submitted by the Likud party during a marathon session of deliberations led by Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg. Likud sought to disqualify both the list as a whole and MK Cassif individually. Conversely, the Attorney General’s office expressed opposition to the motion to disqualify the Joint List.
The ruling against the Joint List marked the culmination of an unprecedented wave of disqualifications throughout the day. Earlier, the Committee had disqualified the Ra’am list by the same margin—18 to five—following three separate motions filed by Likud, Otzma Yehudit, and the “Choosing Life” forum of bereaved families. During the hearing regarding Ra’am, the petitioners alleged links between associations affiliated with the party and entities connected to terrorism, and presented statements made by Mansour Abbas. Conversely, the representative of the Attorney General determined that Abbas’s statements did not provide an evidentiary or legal basis to support the claim that he supports armed struggle. Earlier, the committee had approved the disqualification of MK Ofer Cassif and Sami Abu Shehadeh.
Alongside the right-wing factions, the Yisrael Beiteinu party had made its support for disqualifying both the lists and the candidates clear from the outset: “Any Zionist government formed must define the elimination of Hamas as a central security policy objective. Any party that opposes this has no place in Israel’s Knesset; therefore, we will vote in favor of disqualifying the Joint List, Ra’am, Ofer Cassif, and Sami Abu Shehadeh.” These deliberations are part of a two-day marathon session addressing approximately ten different disqualification motions filed under Section 7A of Basic Law: The Knesset—which bars a party or candidate from running if they negate Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state, incite racism, or support armed struggle. The motions targeted various groups, including Otzma Yehudit, the Democrats, the Religious Zionism list, Zehut, and Balad, as well as individual candidates.
Over the past few decades, there have been repeated precedents in which the Central Elections Committee voted to disqualify Arab lists or their candidates, only for the High Court of Justice to overturn those decisions and allow them to run, citing the stringent evidentiary threshold required to invoke Section 7A. Consequently, while the Committee’s rulings represent an immediate political victory for those seeking disqualification, the true battle over the lineup for the 26th Knesset elections is only just beginning in the Supreme Court.