Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara has asked the Supreme Court to approve the disqualification of Balad chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh from the October 27 election, according to a position filed on Tuesday.
In the filing, submitted ahead of Thursday’s hearings on candidate and party disqualifications, the attorney-general and chief prosecutor Amit Aisman argued that Abu Shehadeh meets the legal threshold for disqualification because he supported an armed struggle by a terrorist organization against the State of Israel.
The Supreme Court is reviewing the Central Elections Committee’s September 23 decision to disqualify Abu Shehadeh, as required before the disqualification of an individual candidate can become final.
Disqualification of Abu Shehadeh on the grounds of Basic Law
At the heart of the case is Section 7A of Basic Law: The Knesset. It establishes three grounds for disqualifying a candidate or electoral list: negating Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state; incitement to racism; and supporting an armed struggle by an enemy state or terrorist organization against Israel.
The Elections Committee disqualified Abu Shehadeh on the first and third grounds. Baharav-Miara, however, asked the court to approve his disqualification only on the armed-struggle ground and to overturn the committee’s decision concerning Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state.
The attorney-general’s position centered on an Arabic-language article Abu Shehadeh published on two news sites on October 8, 2023, while the Hamas-led attack was still underway.
“The article Abu Shehadeh published on October 8, 2023 - one day after the murderous terrorist attack began, and while it was still underway - expresses a position of support for the armed struggle of the Hamas terrorist organization against the State of Israel,” a statement on behalf of Baharav-Miara and Aisman said.
According to the filing, the article described the attack as a historic military, political and strategic event and argued that, if the small and besieged Gaza Strip could achieve intelligence concealment and operational surprise, others could do so.
The attorney-general argued that the article’s content, context and timing made it an exceptionally grave piece of evidence that could independently satisfy the normally stringent threshold for disqualification.
The filing also cited a social-media post showing three men whom the disqualification application identified as terrorists, accompanied by words of respect and appreciation.
Abu Shehadeh, in a response filed with the court, asked the justices to reject the disqualification. He argued that a single article containing no explicit call for violence could not meet the Supreme Court’s requirement for clear and convincing evidence of repeated conduct demonstrating that support for armed struggle was a dominant part of a candidate’s political activity.
He acknowledged that the article’s timing and its failure to condemn the October 7 massacre were problematic. He said he regretted publishing it and would not write or publish it in the same form today.
However, Abu Shehadeh maintained that the article was an attempt to analyze events as he understood them when it was written, rather than an expression of support for Hamas’s attack. He argued that its only practical proposal was a diplomatic initiative involving the Palestinian Authority and neighboring Arab states, intended to end the war and halt bloodshed on both sides.
His response said the Elections Committee had disregarded his repeated public condemnations of attacks on Israeli civilians and crimes committed by Hamas, as well as his parliamentary and civic record. It said no evidence had been presented of any concrete act by Abu Shehadeh supporting armed struggle or of involvement in unlawful activity.
The response also accused the committee and the attorney-general of applying different standards to Arab candidates and right-wing electoral lists. It argued that far larger bodies of evidence presented in attempts to disqualify Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionism-Zehut had been found insufficient, while a single article was treated as sufficient in Abu Shehadeh’s case.
Approving the ban under those circumstances, the response said, would create “two separate tracks based on nationality” for exercising the right to vote and stand for election.
Adalah - The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which represents Abu Shehadeh, similarly accused the attorney-general of “blatant discrimination between Jewish and Arab political candidates.”
“By her logic, those who called for genocide in Gaza and incited hate crimes and pogroms in the West Bank are free to run in the elections, while an Arab candidate is barred over a single article, which did not include any call for violence,” the organization said.
A-G says explanations 'unconvincing'
The attorney-general’s filing rejected Abu Shehadeh’s explanations as partial and unconvincing. It said they did not adequately address the article’s timing, its failure to condemn the attack or its discussion of the operational lessons others could draw from it.
Baharav-Miara’s new position goes further than her submission before the Elections Committee hearing. At that stage, representatives of her office said the article appeared to provide a basis for the armed-struggle allegation and that the committee should consider the request seriously after hearing Abu Shehadeh’s response, but stopped short of expressly recommending his disqualification.
During the committee hearing, a representative of the attorney-general said there was a basis for the request. After considering Abu Shehadeh’s affidavit and oral explanations, the attorney-general is now explicitly asking the Supreme Court to approve the disqualification on that ground.
The original application was filed by Otzma Yehudit and its chairman, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. Abu Shehadeh is running in third place on the Joint List.
Ben-Gvir welcomed the attorney-general’s position, saying, “Even the attorney-general and the state attorney cannot deny the evidence we presented against Sami Abu Shehadeh.” He criticized the attorney-general’s office for not gathering the material itself and credited attorney David Bavli, No. 11 on Otzma Yehudit’s electoral list, with compiling it.
Committee representatives voted 30-4 to disqualify Abu Shehadeh on the Jewish-and-democratic-state ground. Committee chairman Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg also voted on the armed-struggle ground, bringing the tally on that ground to 31-4.
The court will review Abu Shehadeh’s disqualification on Thursday before the same nine-justice panel that will subsequently hear challenges concerning the disqualifications of MK Ofer Cassif and the Joint List.