Israel’s election panel bars every majority-Arab list, and the opposition supplies the votes

The committee voted on Wednesday to disqualify both the Joint List — the Hadash, Ta’al and Balad slate — and Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am, in effect removing every majority-Arab list from the 27 October election. The Jerusalem Post recorded both list bans at 18–5 with one abstention, and the personal disqualification of Balad chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh at 31–4. Hadash MK Ofer Cassif was also disqualified; The Files has not obtained that tally. The votes are confirmed independently by the Times of Israel, Haaretz, the Jerusalem Post and i24NEWS. The Attorney General’s Office had told the panel the evidence against both slates was insufficient to meet the disqualification threshold. The committee barred them anyway. On Abu Shehadeh alone the legal picture ran the other way: both Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara and the committee’s chairman, Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, supported serious consideration of his case.

The procedural asymmetry matters. Per the Jerusalem Post, list-level disqualifications do not go automatically to the Supreme Court, because they concern whole slates rather than individual candidates; Ra’am and the Joint List must file their own appeals, expected to be heard next week. Individual bans, including Abu Shehadeh’s and Cassif’s, require court confirmation under Basic Law: The Knesset. The same paper notes the committee plenum is “primarily a political body composed of representatives of factions in the outgoing Knesset,” and that its rulings — including earlier bans on Balad — have frequently been overturned. The Times of Israel’s own headline calls the decision likely to be reversed. That is a newspaper’s forecast, not a ruling, and should be read as one.

What is new is who voted. Gadi Eisenkot, the former IDF chief of staff who now chairs Yashar, backed Otzma Yehudit’s petition against Abu Shehadeh over remarks made immediately after 7 October 2023; Benny Gantz’s Blue and White said its representatives would follow. The Times of Israel described “all opposition parties” backing the Abu Shehadeh disqualification “in rare consensus.” Yashar’s statement: “Support for the armed struggle of a terrorist organization against Israel is grounds for disqualifying a candidate. In our view, Abu Shehadeh crossed that line.” Joint List chairman Yousef Jabareen replied that “you cannot talk about replacing the right-wing government while at the same time taking part in the campaign to delegitimize representatives of the Arab public.” The Democrats' Yair Golan took a middle position, invoking “redlines” while opposing blanket exclusion and saying he would also back barring Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Assessment: The arithmetic explains the vote better than the evidence does. Channel 12’s survey of 22 September, written up by Haaretz, puts Eisenkot’s bloc at 54 against the coalition’s 50, with Arab lists holding twelve seats — and Haaretz notes, as in every recent poll, that the non-Arab opposition cannot form a government without them. Eisenkot is buying insurance on his right flank against a cost he expects the High Court to absorb. Two things to distrust: the confident predictions of reversal, which are editorial judgement; and the Abu Shehadeh article at the centre of the case, which reached the Israeli press through a partisan outlet quoting a second outlet in translation. Nobody arguing about it in public has shown the original.