Israel's top court restores Ra'am and the Joint List, and Cassif, for 27 October

Israel's Supreme Court on Friday restored two Arab-majority lists to the 27 October Knesset ballot and, by a narrower vote, restored one of their most contested lawmakers. The panel was unanimous in overturning the Central Elections Committee's ban on the Joint List and on Ra'am. It voted 7-2 to let Joint List MK Ofer Cassif run. The two dissenters were Justices David Mintz and Alex Stein.

The committee had voted last month to disqualify both lists, Cassif, and Sami Abu Shehadeh, the Balad leader, after motions from right-wing parties including Likud and Otzma Yehudit. Under Israeli election law a party or a candidate can be barred for inciting racism, for denying Israel's existence as a Jewish and democratic state, or for supporting armed conflict against Israel. A committee decision does not stick on its own. The Supreme Court has to approve it. That review is what Friday's sitting was.

Abu Shehadeh did not wait for the written ruling. Supreme Court President Isaac Amit told him on Thursday that a majority of the bench would bar him. He withdrew his candidacy before Friday's decision. The lists stayed. The individual at the head of Balad did not. Yisrael Beytenu answered that outcome directly: so long as Abu Shehadeh remains head of Balad and representatives of his party sit in the Knesset, the party said, a terror organisation is being represented in the Knesset, and Balad should be outlawed. The court did not outlaw the party. It refused the committee's ban on the list that includes Balad.

Cassif is a Jewish MK from Hadash, the Arab-Jewish party inside the Joint List, and a long critic of Israeli policy toward Palestinians. The Times of Israel reported that all nine justices objected to his comments and actions. Only Mintz and Stein thought those comments reached the critical mass of evidence that he supports armed struggle against the state, which is one of the three statutory grounds for a ban. The other seven found the committee had not met the test the court has used in earlier disqualification cases. The 7-2 split is the part of Friday's ruling that is not a formality. The lists were a clean reversal. Cassif was the argued case.

Ra'am, the United Arab List, is the Islamist party that sat in the 2021-2022 change government, the first time an independent Arab party joined an Israeli coalition as a full partner. Its current list includes Yoav Segalovitz, a former Yesh Atid MK. The Joint List is a merger of Hadash, Ta'al and Balad. Palestinian citizens of Israel are about a fifth of the population. A ban on both of the main lists that seek their votes would have taken that fifth out of the party system for this election, even if some voters then scattered to other tickets. Friday's ruling puts them back on the sheet.

The political arithmetic is why the committee vote and the court vote will be read together for the next three weeks. Polling cited in Israeli coverage has suggested that parties opposed to Benjamin Netanyahu would struggle to build a majority without defections from his bloc, and that Arab-majority lists can decide whether a hung Knesset tips one way or the other. The court did not say that. It said the legal tests were not met. The consequence sits one step downstream. A Knesset election on 27 October now includes Ra'am and the Joint List. It does not include Abu Shehadeh as a candidate.

The committee is coalition-weighted. Its members are mostly sitting lawmakers. That is why the statute sends its bans upstairs. Friday's unanimous holding on the two lists says the upstairs review still functions as a check when the downstairs vote is political. The 7-2 on Cassif says the check is not automatic. Two justices were prepared to keep him off. Seven were not, even while all nine condemned what he had said and done. That distinction, between objection and disqualification, is the usable part of the ruling for anyone watching the next petition.

Balad remains inside the Joint List. Its leader is off the ballot. Yisrael Beytenu has already said that arrangement is not enough and that the party itself should be banned. No such ban was before the court on Friday. The next date that matters is 27 October, when the lists the committee tried to strike will be on the paper.