Is The Way Being Cleared For Netanyahu To Win Israel’s Election?

Israel votes on October 27. Benjamin Netanyahu needs 61 of the Knesset’s 120 seats to form a majority, and current polling still has his coalition short. Then came two extraordinary days at Israel’s Central Elections Committee.

Both Major Arab Lists Were Voted Out

On September 23, the committee voted 18 to 5 to disqualify Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am, then 18 to 5 to disqualify the Joint List, the alliance of Hadash, Ta’al and Balad. It also barred two individual candidates: Balad chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh, and Ofer Cassif, a Jewish lawmaker running on the Joint List. Cassif’s inclusion matters. He is not an Arab candidate, which suggests the committee was acting on political positions as much as on identity.

Palestinian citizens are roughly one fifth of Israel’s population. The Joint List called the votes an attempt to deny the voices of more than a million citizens. Ra’am called its own exclusion political and unacceptable.

Ra’am’s disqualification is the strangest part. This is the party that joined the Bennett-Lapid coalition in 2021, the only Israeli government since 2009 that did not include Netanyahu. The party that cooperated was barred anyway.

The Attorney General Said There Was No Case

Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara and State Attorney Amit Eisman found no sufficient legal basis to disqualify Ra’am, the Joint List, Balad or Cassif. Her representative told the committee that the quotations in the petitions themselves showed Abbas recognising Israel’s Jewish character, and called the case against the Joint List very thin. The committee voted to bar them regardless.

There is one exception. On Abu Shehadeh, the Attorney General said the evidence could indicate support for armed struggle and that his explanation did not remove the concern, while stopping short of formally recommending disqualification. The committee barred him 30 to 4. In a break with decades of precedent, committee chairman Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg voted himself, in favour. Every major opposition party backed that vote too. This is the one disqualification that may survive.

Then Ben-Gvir And Smotrich Were Cleared

One day later, the committee rejected petitions against Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit, 19 to 10, and cleared Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism-Zehut slate. The petition against Otzma Yehudit cited Ben-Gvir telling Arab residents of East Jerusalem that he was their landlord, his minister Amichay Eliyahu suggesting a nuclear bomb on Gaza, the Baruch Goldstein portrait that once hung in his home, and his party’s attendance at memorials for Meir Kahane, whose Kach party was banned as a terror organisation.

Baharav-Miara opposed that disqualification too, while describing the evidence as deeply troubling and close to prohibited territory. By the end of the hearings, every Jewish-majority slate challenged had been cleared and both principal Arab lists had been voted out.

The Election Maths

A Channel 12 poll published September 23 put Eisenkot’s Yashar on 23 seats and Likud on 20, with Netanyahu’s coalition bloc at 50 and Eisenkot’s at 54. The Arab parties held 12. In survey after survey, the Jewish opposition cannot form a government without them.

Who Actually Decided This

The Central Elections Committee is chaired by a Supreme Court justice but composed of Knesset faction representatives, and the coalition holds 18 of its 31 seats. The Israel Democracy Institute calls that combination of political composition and quasi-judicial power highly unusual by international standards.

Now The Court Moves

Adalah, representing every barred party and candidate, called the process arbitrary, inciting and racist, and said it ended with the disqualification of all Palestinian representation in the Knesset. The Supreme Court considers the appeals next week and has overturned such bans before, including Balad’s in 2022 and in 2003.

There is no verified evidence the committee acted to manufacture a Netanyahu majority. What is established is that he remains below 61 in polling, that both Arab lists were voted out, and that every challenged Jewish party was cleared.

Before voters decide who governs Israel, a court decides who is allowed to run.

By Shizza Umer