Israel’s Supreme Court Pushes Palestinian Candidate to Withdraw From Elections

Por Shireen Akram-Boshar — Truthout

Sami Abu Shehadeh, head of the left-wing Balad party, withdrew from Israel’s upcoming elections on Friday.

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On Friday, Sami Abu Shehadeh, head of the Balad party, withdrew from Israel’s upcoming elections, in a maneuver that will likely cost the left-wing party its relevancy in the Israeli parliament.

Israel’s Supreme Court heard appeals on Thursday against the decisions of Israel’s Central Elections Committee, which had voted last week to bar Palestinian parties and two individual candidates from running in Israel’s October 27 elections. The court advised Abu Shehadeh to withdraw.

The committee had voted to ban the two Palestinian-majority political lists: the United Arab List, also known as Ra’am, which represents the Islamic movement inside Israel, as well as the Joint List, which is a coalition of three parties: Hadash, or Jabha in Arabic, a left-wing Jewish and Palestinian party; Ta’al, an anti-Zionist Arab nationalist party; and Balad, a left-wing Palestinian party.

The committee had also voted to bar Ofer Cassif, a Jewish politician from the Hadash party, and Abu Shehadeh of Balad.

Israel’s Supreme Court will rule on Sunday on whether or not to push through with the bans of the parties and candidates. But it is the barring of Abu Shehadeh that is most likely to stick, Palestinian political analyst Diana Buttu told Truthout.

Israel’s Supreme Court indicated that they are likely to ban Abu Shehadeh, Buttu explained, but first gave him the option to withdraw, which he eventually decided to take.

While the Central Elections Committee is heavily represented by the far right Likud Party, and is pushing for the barring of all of the Palestinian-majority parties from the Israeli elections, it is unlikely that their complaints against the parties will meet the needed threshold previously set by the Israeli Supreme Court.

Israel’s parliamentary law allows for banning candidates for “denial of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state,” “incitement to racism,” or “support for armed struggle by a hostile state or a terrorist organization against the State of Israel.”

“What’s fascinating is that over the course of the past three years, all we’ve heard is one racist statement after another,” Buttu told Truthout — but it has been from the Zionist parties, rather than from the Palestinian-majority parties or candidates.

“And yet what they’ve honed in on with Sami is that he wrote an article about October 7, which he wrote the very next day, on October 8, calling it an ‘important historical event.” While he has distanced himself from these comments, saying he did not realize the consequences of October 7, Israel’s parliament is using them as an excuse to ban him and further punish his left-wing party.

The consequences of banning him, Buttu says, “are huge.” It could lead to the indictment of Abu Shehadeh, as well as lower voter turnout from supporters of the Balad party, and significantly lower representation by the Balad party in the next parliament.

Because the Joint List had united the three left-wing parties — Hadash, Ta’al, and Balad — it was expected that they would get a higher number of seats in parliament in the October 27 elections, Buttu explained. But Abu Shehadeh’s ouster could mean his party may end up with just one or two seats, losing its political relevance.

Balad, Buttu says, “is the only party that says there should be equality between Palestinians and Israelis.”

Formed in 1995 by Palestinian intellectuals in Israel led by Azmi Bishara, the Balad party calls for transforming Israel into a secular “state of all its citizens,” with equal rights for Palestinians.

In 2015, the Joint List, which at the time represented all four Palestinian-majority parties — Ra’am, Ta’al, Hadash, and Balad — won more than a dozen seats in Israel’s Knesset, which saw the peak of its political representation in Israel’s parliament. While the parties had split up in recent years, the reunification of Ta’al, Hadash, and Balad brought about expectations for similarly high representation in the coming election.

Buttu also spoke about some of the issues faced by Palestinian residents of Israel, including high rates of violence in their neighborhoods, which incentivize Palestinians to vote in Israeli elections if just with the hope of improving the conditions of their day-to-day lives.

While there is a debate within Palestinian society inside Israel over whether or not to participate in the electoral system, many Palestinian residents of Israel are moved to vote in order to remove ministers like Itamar Ben Gvir, who has armed Zionist communities and further endangered Palestinian citizens of Israel.

“We know that liberation isn’t going to come through the ballot box – that’s a myth – but if there’s ways that we can still preserve ourselves, our identity, our families, our remaining [on the land], this is where people are looking for these very small things, but for many Palestinians, it becomes a big thing,” Buttu said.

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Shireen Akram-Boshar is a socialist writer, editor and Middle East/North Africa solidarity activist.

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Fonte: Truthout