The Zionist consensus behind Israel’s anti-Arab election bans

If we do not believe in the justice of our cause, the legitimacy of our demands and our right to express them, then there is no life for us in this country, our country.

For the past three or four decades, Israeli right-wing parties have made a habit, at every election, of submitting petitions to disqualify Arab parties or Arab MPs and prevent them from standing for parliament.

One of the many peculiarities of Israeli 'democracy' is that political parties are entrusted with deciding whether rival parties should be allowed to contest elections at all.

It has become a recurring populist ritual, one that people have grown accustomed to, just as they have grown accustomed to so many other abnormalities that have become normalised in Israeli society. They should not be.

Each time, the victims of their fellow parliamentarians turn to the Supreme Court in search of redress. This plays out within the familiar Israeli tension between right-wing party populism and a Supreme Court that, by comparison, presents itself as the last bastion of Israeli liberalism. In previous elections, the court has indeed overturned attempts to bar Balad from standing.

But in truth, it is a bastion of Israeli liberalism only beneath a Zionist ceiling, one that has been dropping steadily.

In recent years, that ceiling has fallen below much of what was achieved in the 1990s in the fields of civil rights, freedom of expression and other liberal gains. This has taken place amid Israel’s continuing drift to the right, the growing convergence between Zionism and religious Zionism, the denial of Palestinian rights and the normalisation of occupation violence as something society can simply live with.

The changing composition of the Supreme Court reflects this shift too. It has moved steadily rightwards, to the point where the court now has a right-wing majority.

Much changed after 7 October and Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip. So too did the Zionist conditions placed on freedom of expression and civil rights, even if we limit the discussion to what is happening within the 1948 borders. Palestinian citizens have faced a wider crackdown on expression and dissent since 7 October, including arrests, disciplinary action and punishment over political speech.

The nature of the debate inside the Central Elections Committee has also changed, if “debate” is still the right word for it.

This time, there was a full Zionist consensus in favour of disqualifying MP Sami Abu Shehadeh, going beyond the usual Zionist majority that supports banning Arab parties.

More unusually still, the committee chairman, Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, voted in favour of the disqualification.

The case rests on a single article Abu Shehadeh wrote on 7 October itself and which was published the following day in The New Arab, before the full nature of the operation had become clear. This is despite the fact that, throughout the three years since, he has repeatedly expressed positions that contradict what is being attributed to him on the basis of that article.

Dangerous precedents

We are therefore facing two dangerous precedents.

The first is the consensus inside the committee, including the vote of its chairman, a Supreme Court justice, in favour of disqualification.

The second is the disqualification of a candidate not because of a consistent political position or a sustained course of action, but because of a single article.

What seems clear is that, in the first election of the post-7 October era, an Arab sacrifice is required as the price for allowing Arab parties to participate at all.

Someone must be placed on the altar of the racist Zionist consensus that has hardened since 7 October.

There is no other convincing explanation for disqualifying Abu Shehadeh and barring him from the election. The current proceedings have targeted not only Abu Shehadeh but Palestinian parties and candidates more broadly.

They would prefer to disqualify Balad as well because of its advocacy of a state of all its citizens. But they have not found a legal pretext for doing so, and cannot easily do so while the party is contesting the election within a Joint List rather than independently.

One has to make a real effort to remain composed when remembering that the petition was submitted by Itamar Ben-Gvir, a man known not only to Palestinians but to the Israeli courts themselves for racist, violent and extremist conduct, and who has criminal convictions. His record includes a conviction for racist incitement and support for a terrorist organisation.

Yet the chairman of the committee, a Supreme Court justice, found more common ground with Ben-Gvir than with Sami Abu Shehadeh, the Balad and Joint List candidate, a democrat who believes in human values, the rights of peoples and equality between Arabs and Jews.

Then came the familiar chorus in the Israeli media.

Journalists known for their hostility towards Balad, precisely because it is in many respects more democratic and more liberal than they are, rushed to join in. Many remain trapped in their obsession with Dr Azmi Bishara without having read a single word of his books or articles, not even the political writings that should be accessible to them.

His writings over the past three years have repeatedly affirmed the legitimacy of resisting occupation, while placing two clear limits on that resistance.

The first is moral. Resistance does not have the right to cross certain ethical lines, and he has consistently rejected targeting or harming civilians.

The second is strategic. Resistance cannot be allowed to damage the cause of the people it is supposed to serve. Bishara has continued to develop his thinking on resistance, political strategy and the future of the Palestinian struggle in his writing on the Palestinian national project after the Gaza genocide. 

Zionist-only elections

The current effort to restrict electoral participation according to the boundaries of a wartime Zionist consensus should surprise no one.

This is a state and a society in which no genuine protest movement emerged against the genocidal war being waged on the Palestinian people, no serious protest emerged over the killing of more than 20,000 children, and no meaningful movement arose against settler violence carried out under the protection and with the support of the Israeli army in the West Bank and Gaza. Recent cases have documented settlers acting while Israeli forces blocked Palestinians and activists from intervening.

The populist hysteria inside the Elections Committee, its decisions and the chorus of incitement surrounding them are therefore not surprising to Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Nor is the chorus in the media, or the panic of those among us who have become frightened of their own shadow. We have seen three years of blood-soaked hysteria. The pressure has extended beyond electoral politics into universities, where Palestinian students have faced disciplinary proceedings over expressions of Palestinian identity and opposition to the war.

What is more remarkable is that some frightened figures on the margins of the Zionist left are now whispering that Sami Abu Shehadeh should withdraw his candidacy before the Supreme Court considers the disqualification.

They say he should not challenge the decision, even though a decision by the Elections Committee to disqualify a candidate is automatically referred to the court for approval or rejection, whether or not the candidate himself files an appeal.

They also suggest that Balad and Abu Shehadeh should avoid the Supreme Court altogether, lest a legal precedent be created.

Their assumption is that the court will inevitably uphold the disqualification and thereby establish a precedent for barring a candidate from elections on the basis of a single article.

Supreme Injustice

The injustice, in other words, may go ahead. What matters to some is that “Israeli liberalism” should not be stained by having its name attached to it.

As though Israeli liberalism had not already been stained by the killing of Gaza’s children, the legitimisation of the dispossession of the West Bank, and the abuse of its people.

Imagine a qualified person applying for a job at an institution and being told: do not apply, because you will be rejected for being Arab, and then the institution will look racist.

That is essentially what Balad, Abu Shehadeh and their supporters are being told.

Do not force the court to issue a ruling that reveals it to be more Zionist than liberal.

Do not force it to appear to be on Ben-Gvir’s side.

But is the victim of injustice expected to remain silent and abandon a legitimate legal case merely to spare the court the embarrassment of endorsing injustice?

Is that the responsibility of the person seeking justice, or of those who choose to deny it?

Withdrawing Abu Shehadeh’s candidacy under these circumstances would mean three things.

First, it would amount to recognising the legitimacy, or at least the validity, of the disqualification.

Second, it would mean abandoning legal arguments that are both available and sufficient, arguments that any just court ought to accept. Anyone who opposes the disqualification should begin from that premise.

Third, it would help conceal the racist face of the current Zionist consensus.

If the answer is that the decision has already been made and that it is fundamentally political, then so be it.

Legal argument does not replace principled political argument over the occupation, freedom of expression, citizenship, the limits of political participation, or Ben-Gvir and what he represents.

But neither, from the standpoint of law or justice, should the legal argument be abandoned.

Let the court make a political decision if that is what it chooses to do. It should then bear responsibility for that decision.

The burden should not be shifted onto those challenging the injustice.

Balad should put forward its understanding of liberal democracy against the chauvinistic, nationalist-religious Zionist understanding now being imposed on it.

It should defend its vision of a state of all its citizens, the very position that has earned it so much Zionist hostility and has frightened even those who are afraid to articulate their own rights.

Whatever the court ultimately decides, Balad and Sami Abu Shehadeh have already said they will call on Arab citizens to increase voter turnout in the election. The renewed Joint List entered the election campaign pledging to confront racism and supremacy.

If they were politically colour-blind, they would hardly be doing so.

If we do not believe in the justice of our cause, the legitimacy of our demands and our right to express them, then there is no life for us in this country, our country.

This article is an edited translation of an op-ed from the editorial board of Arab 48, a publication focused on Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.

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