Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party has announced that it will petition the Central Elections Committee to disqualify the Joint List, the electoral alliance backed by Hadash and the Communist Party of Israel (CPI), from running in the October 27 Knesset election.
According to the Al-Ittihad news portal, Likud said it would seek to bar both the Joint List and the Islamist Ra’am party on the grounds that they allegedly “support terrorism".
The move has been denounced by the Joint List as a racist and anti-democratic attempt to silence political opposition and restrict the representation of Palestinian citizens of Israel.
The Joint List brings together Hadash, Balad and Ta’al. Hadash, the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, is the principal electoral framework supported by the Communist Party of Israel and has long combined Jewish-Arab cooperation with opposition to occupation, racism and the policies of successive Israeli governments.
The effort to exclude the alliance is not unprecedented. Israeli right-wing parties have repeatedly attempted to disqualify Arab and left-wing lists or individual candidates, often invoking claims of support for terrorism or rejection of Israel’s definition as a Jewish state. In several past cases, decisions by the Central Elections Committee were later overturned by the High Court.
The present attempt comes in a highly polarized election campaign and against the backdrop of intensified attacks on democratic rights, Arab political representation and anti-war forces inside Israel.
For Hadash and the CPI, the issue goes beyond the right to participate in elections. It concerns the broader effort by the Israeli right to delegitimize communist, Jewish-Arab and anti-occupation political forces at a time when opposition to war, racism and annexationist policies is under growing pressure.
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