Israel’s Central Elections Committee is a rather unusual referee: it is staffed by politicians from the parties competing in the election it oversees, and in the first instance it answers to the parliamentary majority. The Times of Israel describes it as “coalition-controlled,” which is one of those phrases that functions as both a description and a warning. With that context, consider what the committee did on September 23, a little over a month before Israel’s October 27 election.
It voted to disqualify, in bulk. Out went Ra’am, the party led by Mansour Abbas; out went the Joint List, which unites Hadash, Ta’al and Balad; and out went, personally, two men — Ofer Cassif, whom Al Jazeera identifies as a Jewish lawmaker from the Arab-Jewish Hadash party, and Sami Abu Shehadeh, chairman of the Palestinian nationalist Balad party. The cases against the individuals rested on their remarks about the Gaza war.
Every disqualification in Israel is appealable to the Supreme Court, and on Friday the court did what it has often done with this committee’s handiwork: it reversed it. The bans on Ra’am and the Joint List were thrown out unanimously, and the ban on Cassif was overturned 7-2, the Times of Israel reported. Both parties, and Cassif, will appear on the October 27 ballot.
Abu Shehadeh will not. At his hearing on October 1, the court’s president, Justice Isaac Amit, signaled that the bench was inclined to reject his appeal, Haaretz reported, whereupon Abu Shehadeh — advised by the court to drop out, as Al Jazeera put it — formally withdrew his candidacy rather than be ruled off it. There was no verdict on the merits, because by then there was no case. (We covered the withdrawal itself when it happened.)
What did not happen is the other half of the story. Al Jazeera notes that far-right Israeli leaders have “remained untouched” by the disqualification process despite what it describes as their “incendiary rhetoric and calls for violence against Palestinians”; parties led by far-right ministers, some of them internationally sanctioned, stayed on the ballot without challenge. No committee majority ever materialized to examine their fitness to run, because the committee majority includes their allies.
Hence the accusation Al Jazeera reports from critics: that Israel’s political institutions, the electoral body included, operate a double standard — one set of procedures for Palestinian politicians and parties, and another, considerably shorter one for the far right. Palestinian participation in the upcoming vote, Al Jazeera adds, “continues to shrink.”
I think the instructive detail is where the process worked and where it failed. Banning an entire party list is the loud move, and it is also the one a court can most easily undo, because the harm is visible to everyone — whole electorates crossed off the ballot. Suggesting to one man, at one hearing, that his appeal is likely to fail produces no ruling at all, and therefore nothing to reverse. The committee’s majority lost nearly every decision that reached a verdict and still obtained the result that presumably mattered most: four disqualifications announced, three overturned, and one quietly converted into a withdrawal that no court can now overturn.
The durable win, in other words, belonged to the case that was never decided. If you are tracking the design of Israeli election institutions, that is the part worth underlining.