If it weren’t the fact that the fracas at yesterday’s meeting of Israel’s Central Election Committee was theater rather than serious deliberation, I might be more upset about the decision to bar from contesting the coming election two of the three Arab slates represented in the current Knesset. Everyone there, both the right-wingers accusing the Arab parties of sedition and the representatives of said parties charging the Committee with racism, knew that the decision will almost certainly be overturned by the Supreme Court.
That’s what happened 2003, when the Committee sought to ban Balad (National Democratic Assembly), one of the two parties it banned yesterday. The other is the joint slate of Ra’am (United Arab List)/Ta’al (Arab Movement for Renewal).
As Ha’aretz’s Ze’ev Segel explains, the Central Election Committee was empowered by an amendment to the Basic Law on the Knesset of 2002 to disqualify parties that act explicitly or implicitly in support of armed struggle against Israel. In its 2003 ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that disqualification required a high standard of proof that the parties in question were in fact taking active measures to support armed struggle and that the advocacy of armed struggle against Israel was the party’s governing ideology. (Recommended: the Israel Democracy Institute’s position paper on the disqualification of parties, written by Mordechai Kremnitzer.)
Oddly enough, the language in question does not appear on the Knesset website’s version of the law and its amendments . . .
Read the rest on Jewcy–Comment there or here.