Abu Shehadeh withdraws after Supreme Court signals disqualification

The court nevertheless cleared the Joint List, Ra’am and MK Ofer Cassif to run, overturning the Central Elections Committee’s three other disqualification decisions. Abu Shehadeh was therefore the only target of the four proceedings ultimately removed from the ballot.

The four cases reached the court after the committee voted last week to bar Abu Shehadeh and Cassif and to exclude Ra’am and the Joint List, an alliance of Hadash, Ta’al and Balad.

The two lists appealed their disqualifications. The decisions against the two individual candidates automatically reached the Supreme Court because the committee cannot disqualify a candidate without its approval.

Supreme Court precedent reserves disqualification for extreme cases supported by clear, convincing, and unequivocal evidence that the prohibited position is a central and sustained part of the candidate’s or list’s activity.

In Abu Shehadeh’s case, 30 committee representatives voted to disqualify him and four opposed the motion. Committee chairman Justice Noam Sohlberg also took the unusual step of voting in favor, bringing the final tally to 31-4.

The Supreme Court convened on Thursday to consider all four cases. The panel comprised President Isaac Amit and Justices Dafna Barak-Erez, David Mintz, Yael Willner, Ofer Grosskopf, Alex Stein, Gila Canfy-Steinitz, Khaled Kabub and Yechiel Kasher.

Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara and State Attorney Amit Aisman urged the court to approve Abu Shehadeh’s disqualification solely on the ground of supporting armed struggle. Their position focused primarily on an article published on October 8, 2023, which Abu Shehadeh said he had written the previous day while the Hamas attack was still unfolding.

The article described the attack as an event of military, political and strategic significance and discussed its possible political “fruits.”

Adalah director-general Hassan Jabareen, representing Abu Shehadeh, argued that one article could not constitute the required critical mass when weighed against his decades of nonviolent political activity.

The Attorney-General’s representative responded that an exceptional case could be established through a single piece of “golden evidence,” even if the other material would not independently meet the threshold.

Barak-Erez asked how the court should reconcile what she described as an “objectively horrific article” with the far stronger evidentiary foundation ordinarily required to bar a candidate, and what weight should be given to Abu Shehadeh’s roughly 30-year public record.

Stein and Kasher focused on the article’s timing. They suggested that a text written spontaneously while the attack was taking place could reveal Abu Shehadeh’s genuine position more clearly than explanations offered years later.

Grosskopf asked whether the authorities had taken any action when the article appeared. The state said it had not been aware of it at the time. Canfy-Steinitz asked why Abu Shehadeh had not removed the article or issued a condemnation once the scale of the attack became clear.

Abu Shehadeh said the article was intended as a warning that Israel needed to reassess its policies and vulnerabilities, but acknowledged that one of its most disputed passages had failed to convey that meaning.

“The article contains things that were wrong,” he said. “I would not say them today, and I should not have written it that way.”

“I have never called for violence, and I never will,” he added. “I am against it. Those are not my tools.”

After the justices consulted during a break, Amit said they unanimously regarded Abu Shehadeh’s statements as “painful, outrageous and repugnant,” but disagreed on the legal result. He said an emerging majority appeared prepared to approve the disqualification.

All nine justices nevertheless joined a recommendation that Abu Shehadeh consider withdrawing, eliminating the need for a reasoned ruling in his case. Balad accepted the recommendation later that night.

Abu Shehadeh personally submitted an irrevocable resignation letter to the Central Elections Committee on Friday morning. Attorney Yifat Siminovsky, the committee’s legal adviser, certified his identity and that he was resigning of his own free will, and the committee notified the court that the letter had been received.

The resignation became effective once the court accepted the Joint List’s appeal and permitted the slate to run.

In his notice to the court, Jabareen wrote, “Nothing in this notice detracts from the arguments presented before the court or prejudices them.”

The court consequently dismissed the proceeding concerning Abu Shehadeh without deciding whether the evidence against him met the legal threshold for disqualification. The judgment noted that the justices disagreed but had been moving toward approving the committee’s decision; it did not reveal how they were divided.

Adalah, which represented all four candidates and lists, said the rulings confirmed that the applications against the Joint List, Ra’am and Cassif had relied on “old, irrelevant or distorted evidence” that fell short of the required “critical mass.”

The organization said Abu Shehadeh had been “unjustly pushed out of the elections in an unprecedented and dangerous move by the Supreme Court,” and accused those behind the applications of seeking to delegitimize Arab citizens and their parliamentary representatives.

The outcome also sharpened concerns raised before the hearings that the campaign surrounding the disqualification cases could deter Arab voters even where the Supreme Court ultimately overturned the committee’s decisions.

In the other three cases, the court issued a summary judgment on Friday because of the statutory election timetable, saying its full reasons would be released separately.

The panel declined, by a 7-2 majority, to approve Cassif’s disqualification. Amit, Barak-Erez, Willner, Grosskopf, Canfy-Steinitz, Kabub and Kasher formed the majority, while Mintz and Stein dissented.

All nine justices expressed revulsion at some of Cassif’s statements and actions. The majority nevertheless found that the evidence did not satisfy the stringent tests established in previous rulings or form the critical mass required to prove either of the alleged grounds for disqualification.

Mintz and Stein concluded that Cassif’s conduct and statements directly and indirectly demonstrated support for armed struggle against Israel, particularly when considered alongside earlier remarks.

The court also unanimously accepted the Joint List’s appeal, finding that the material submitted to the committee did not meet the standards required to disqualify an entire slate.

It unanimously reached the same conclusion regarding Ra’am, which the committee had barred on all three statutory grounds.

Ben-Gvir claimed Abu Shehadeh’s withdrawal as a victory for his party, though he called it “regrettable” that a judgement had not ultimately been issued.