With fewer than 30 days until Israelis go to the polls, the most consequential campaign battle may not be happening at rallies or on social media, but in a legal process most voters barely understand. On this week's episode of The Deep Dive, host Jacob Laznik sits down with legal affairs correspondent Sarah Ben-Nun to unpack a remarkable week at the Central Elections Committee, which voted to disqualify Ra'am, the Joint List and Balad chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh from the October 27 election, while rejecting petitions against Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit.
If those decisions survive Supreme Court review, a fifth of Israel's population could head into the election without a party of its own. Ben-Nun walks through the three grounds for disqualification set out in Section 7A of Basic Law: The Knesset, explaining in plain terms why the "armed struggle" clause has become the center of the fight, and why the Supreme Court has historically read the law so narrowly that disqualifications are rare.
The heart of the conversation is the case against Abu Shehadeh, built on an Arabic-language article he published on October 8, 2023, one day after the massacre committed by Hamas. Ben-Nun explains why this case stands apart from the others: Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara opposed disqualifying Ra'am, the Joint List, and MK Ofer Cassif, but after criticism of her initially noncommittal stance, her office came out on Tuesday in favor of barring Abu Shehadeh, though only under the armed struggle clause.
Committee chairman Justice Noam Sohlberg also cast an unusual vote of his own. Yet Abu Shehadeh's legal team has raised a pointed question about timing: if the article was criminal, why did police never act on it, and why has it resurfaced only now, nearly three years later? The episode also reveals that the Attorney General's office found Otzma Yehudit came close to crossing the incitement-to-racism threshold, which raises the obvious and unresolved question of how anyone measures "close."
Legal measures behind the politics
What makes this episode essential viewing is that Laznik doesn't let the legal mechanics obscure the politics. He presses on whether a committee made up of sitting Knesset members can fairly judge their own rivals and coalition partners, and whether the mere filing of a petition brands a candidate in voters' minds long before any court rules.
Ben-Nun brings firsthand reporting from a meeting with Arab party leaders, who fear Election Day intimidation and voter suppression at a moment when polls point to unusually high Arab turnout. The two also consider what a ruling against Abu Shehadeh could mean for future elections and for free speech on Palestinian issues during wartime.
Whatever the High Court decides, this conversation offers the context every voter needs before reading the next headline.