Likud says it will ask the elections committee to bar the Arab-majority parties from the 27 October ballot
The party says Ra’am and the Joint List “harm IDF soldiers.” Previous attempts have been struck down by the High Court, and the announcement is not yet a filing.
Likud announced on Monday that it will petition the Central Elections Committee to disqualify the Arab-majority slates from the 27 October ballot. “There is no room in the Knesset for those who harm IDF soldiers and are unable to say that Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist organizations,” the party said in a statement carried by the Times of Israel, which notes the request is unlikely to survive the High Court, which has struck down previous efforts. Haaretz’s morning recap rendered it simply: “Likud seeks to bar Arab parties Joint List, UAL from election.” Two things are not established in what The Files has seen: whether the petition has actually been lodged with the committee, and which member of Knesset would sign it. The Times of Israel’s wording is that Likud “says it will petition” — an announcement, not yet a filing.
The timing follows a consolidation on the other side. Hadash, Ta’al and Balad agreed in mid-August on a joint run, after a deal in which Hadash said Ahmad Tibi accepted the slate on condition that the sixth and ninth places rotate and that Ta’al receive a deputy Knesset speaker position — a settlement reached only days after Ta’al publicly opposed the proposed slate on 9 August while Hadash and Balad backed it. One housekeeping note for anyone following this file: searches currently surface near-identical stories about Likud joining an Otzma Yehudit petition to bar the Joint List ahead of a “September 17” election. Those are from the 2019 cycle, and at least one aggregator carries a 2019 piece with a 2026 crawl date. They are not this story.
assessment
Assessment: A disqualification bid that the party’s own press coverage expects to fail is not primarily a legal strategy, it is a placement strategy: it puts the legitimacy of the Arab slates at the centre of the campaign’s opening weeks and forces every rival to answer for it. Note how it rhymes with the NAZA row — the same test of who is willing to defend whom, applied to a slate rather than a film. Watch for the filing itself and the sponsoring MK, because an announcement that never becomes a petition would confirm the messaging read. And check datelines on this file; the 2019 duplicates are circulating with fresh crawl dates.