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At the time of writing, the Times of Israel (1 October 2026) reports that Sami Abu Shehadeh, chairman of the Palestinian nationalist Balad party, will be disqualified from standing in this year’s Knesset elections. The case is a useful illustration of the untenability of the approach of much of the centrist mainstream, namely to attempt to build a broad coalition to defend democratic institutions by sidelining the Palestinian question and thereby appealing to soft-right voters.
To a crude first approximation, the proper interpretation of this case lies somewhere between two extremes. We can focus on the legal (il)logic of the decision, on the assumption that there really is such a thing as a legal logic of the court’s behaviour beyond the political, and examine the future implications of the court’s handling of this case. Or we can parse the court’s act as a political manœuvre by the camp it represents. Since I am very boring, I think the proper interpretation of this case lies somewhere between; since I am even more boring, I think that it doesn’t actually matter precisely where that lies, because, either way, the conclusion one should reach is similar.
i. Disqualification before the Shehadeh case.
Section 7A of Basic Law: the Knesset provides for the disqualification of persons and lists
should there be explicitly or implicity in the goals or actions of the list, or the actions of the person, including his expressions, as applicable, one of the following:
- negation 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.
In Lieberman et al v Cassif et al (EDA 1806/19, ¶ 16) the Supreme Court held that, for a disqualification to be upheld,
it must be shown that the list or the candidate actively works for the realization of the said objectives, and that there was non-sporadic activity for their realization…[and] a showing of systematic, repeated activity ‘whose intensity must be given severe, extreme expression’ (the second Neiman case, p. 196; the Tibi case, p. 18; the Balad case, para. 4; the first Zoabi case, para. 14).
On these grounds, it is often argued that the disqualification procedure is mere theatre. Although the Central Election Committee—which largely comprises political appointees—votes in the first instance on the admissibility of electoral lists, the Supreme Court eventually applies a more democratically acceptable test. So the argument goes.
ii. The legal establishment’s reasoning in the Abu Shehadeh case.
In the instant case, Abu Shehadeh was disqualified on the basis of one article, published on 8 October 2023. I do not propose, in this note, to address its content at length, but I shall say that I do not think it obvious that it does in fact ‘support…armed struggle’. Even supposing that to be true, a disqualification on the basis of just one article plainly contradicts the standard laid down in Lieberman et al v Cassif et al: ‘systematic, repeated activity’.
Nevertheless, the Attorney General, the Deputy Chief Justice (sitting as chairman of the Central Election Committee) and now a majority of the Supreme Court have held otherwise. The Jerusalem Post (29 September 2026) reports that the Attorney General supported the disqualification in spite of that contradiction on two grounds. First, she cited a second post including a photo of alleged terrorists. This is not very convincing: a grand total of two pieces of evidence hardly is ‘systematic’. Second, she argues 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’. But this is an argument-shaped hole rather than an actual argument.
To me, it is perfectly arguable that the court’s holdings Lieberman et al v Cassif et al and previous cases imposed an excessive evidentiary standard. In that case, a respectable jurist would then propose a new standard, and then apply it to Shehadeh’s case. That is not what happened. The Attorney General’s submission to the Central Election Committee did not offer a substitute standard, but instead nebulously appealed to ‘context and timing’. Even more perplexingly, on appeal to the Supreme Court, its president, Isaac Amit, asked Shehadeh to withdraw, which would obviate the need for any fresh standard to be substituted for the test laid down in Lieberman et al v Cassif et al—no judgment, no ratio.
During the hearings, some judges appeared to substitute a far more stringent test (The Times of Israel, 1 October 2026).
The judges asked whether Abou Shehadeh can point to an English-language article in which he called Hamas a terrorist organization or called for the release of the hostages.
His attorney Hassan Jabareen objects: ‘Are you now judging him for things he didn’t say?’
If we were to attempt to reconstruct the standard applied by the judges here, it would appear to have at least two elements.
- A single article is at least prima facie evidence of one of the objectives prohibited by section 7A of Basic Law: the Knesset.
- The burden of proof then lies on the candidate to demonstrate otherwise.
I do not propose to argue that this is, per se, an unreasonable test, although I think it is. It is very obviously different from the test laid down in Lieberman et al v Cassif et al. It is an abdication of judicial responsibility to pretend otherwise. Indeed, if the court believes that such a test is appropriate, that is especial reason to clearly state a new standard in a new judgment. And yet the court proposed instead Abu Shehadeh should withdraw, with a precisely opposite effect.
Taking these legal developments at face value, the prognosis for Palestinian/Arab participation in Israeli politics is very poor. In place of the clear and stringent test laid down in Lieberman et al v Cassif et al, the court has substituted a miasma of unclarity at the time of writing. Moreover, in asking Abu Shehadeh to withdraw with a view to their not having to offering a reasoned decision, this is clearly their preferred outcome. If Abu Shehadeh declines to withdraw his appeal (as, I think, he should), the court will have to state a new standard. The foregoing indicates that the court is grasping at straws and working backwards from its desired conclusion to what will very likely be an ad hoc and substantially less clear standard than the one it replaced.
iii. The juridico-political hollow centre.
A pretty natural reaction to the foregoing section is to claim that it’s a waste of time. The real logic here is political; more specifically, this is just the latest instance of institutional discrimination against Palestinian/Arab citizens of Israel. There is nothing surprising here, and it is a waste of time to attempt to focus on the merely pretextual remarks of the ‘gatekeepers’ and ‘statesmanlike’ institutions.
That, I think, is mistaken. I don’t say that because I think that Israel has ever been a state of all its citizens or that there has ever been ‘complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex’. The problem, however, is that this logic ignores that discrimination is always a matter of degree, and things can always get worse. As Yair Wallach put it, it is dangerous to ‘downplay[] the unique features of Kahanism and what makes it different [by] insisting that it’s “more of the [Zionist] same”, an unchanging trajectory of settler colonialism etc’. Interpreted politically, the court’s actions should be seen at a minimum as an indication of the hopelessness of a defence of Israeli democracy (even in its herrenvolk form) purely on the basis of internal struggle, and, in my view, as a significant misjudgement on the part of the court.
Ignoring the legal standard, the court’s previous jurisprudence, interpreted as a political arrangement between Israel’s mainstream centrist/liberal Zionist camp and its Arab/Palestinian population, amounted to a clear acceptance of Palestinian/Arab electoral participation. This dates back to Kach v Central Election Committee (EA 1/88) and Ben Shalom v Central Election Committee (EA 2/88), in which the court allowed the Arab–Jewish Progressive List for Peace to stand but disqualified the Kahanist party Kach. The durability of this standard is in evidence by the repeated refusal of the court to allow the disqualification of Palestinian/Arab parties since 1988. The mainstream/liberal Zionist camp both had the political resources to prevent disqualification and used them. It clearly judged that the bargain was to its advantage. In disqualifying Abu Shehadeh, that has clearly changed: and that conclusion follows whether we reason politically or juridically (as in the foregoing section).
In the Boston Review (25 March 2025), Shai Agmon chastises Israel’s ‘hollow centre’ for its failed strategy of capitulation to the far right.
The new center didn’t just fail to uphold left-wing values like peace, security and the two-state solution—if that were the only charge, it could simply brush it aside, claiming, ‘We are not purist leftists; that is not what we are in politics for.’ The real indictment is far more damning: the new center has failed its voters on its own terms. It promised moderation and unity but instead deepened polarization and fueled extremism. It vowed to defend democratic institutions yet stood idle as they came under siege. It claimed pragmatism and political savvy but proved incapable of expanding its base. In the end, the new center not only betrayed its own ambitions but actively worsened the very crises it pledged to resolve.
The recent jurisprudence of the Supreme Court matches this pattern. The disqualification of Palestinian and Arab society excludes twenty per cent of Israel’s citizenry, and thereby shrinks the portion of the selectorate willing to defend its independence. The purpose of this capitulation, read politically, is to avoid alienating the portion of the electorate opposed to the participation of Arab and Palestinian parties in the election. In my view, this strategy is as unlikely to work as the hollow centre’s. The court and the juridico-political hollow centre it represents can no longer articulate a coherent standard for Palestinian or Arab participation in electoral politics at all. Thus, just like its political counterpart, it is preëmptively surrendering the political battlefield.
iv. Internal struggle and external pressure.
Nominally pro-Israeli critics of the Netanyahu government frequently advocate ‘engagement’ with supposed moderates in Israel, and reject, on these grounds, external pressure as an impediment to that engagement. Clearly, at some point on any path to a just peace, there will be some form of engagement, but this logic in many ways ignores the obvious question: engagement with whom? The centrist mainstream, as this case shows, is no longer willing or able to preserve the basic standards of the rule of law that are its principal remaining defence from Kahanism.
The Kahanist cancer in Israel cannot be managed; every moment it is ignored or appeased, it grows. It may be that the Supreme Court made the best decision in the circumstances it could. If that is so, it is even more incumbent to ask how the foreign policy of Israel’s partners can change those circumstances.