Azmi Bishara

Our viewers may not know these names, but Sami Abu-Shahadeh and the former member of Knesset, who today is living in Qatar.

Azmi Bishara.

Azmi Bishara, who's an avowed communist Islamist, but who, as these two men, have been very full of great incitement and are receiving a lot of... media exposure from Al Jazeera, which brings us to a new point, which is I have made the point over the last two days that these are the first seriously international elections taking place in Israel because hanging over these elections is a dark cloud called the Islamic Republic of Iran.

And there is more than enough evidence now to show that between Qatar and Iran, there were great fears and concerns in the Israeli security echelons of foreign interference in the elections.

Now, we don't know what specific types of foreign interference, but there is now some evidence that there is some financial interference.

They're nativized by their long presence.

As a good Palestinian friend of mine says, Azmi Bishara, uh, if you can expel the settlers in the f- the first wave of settlers, then you can do it, but if you fail to do it, you will have to l- coexist with the third wave, uh, third generation of settlers.

And that, that's where Palestine and Israel is now.

No one is going away-

Sammy Abushakhla is a former Knesset member and a chairman of Balad, a left-wing party promoting anti-Zionism and Palestinian nationalism.

Balad was founded by Azmi Bishara, who left Israel in two thousand and seven amid suspicions of aiding Hezbollah.

On October eighth, twenty twenty-three, while Israelis were still being hunted in their homes, Abushakhla published an article calling the attack, quote, "an important historical event militarily, politically, and strategically." He added, quote, "If small besieged Gaza could do this, others can do it more efficiently and simply." Now, his article seemingly violates the requirements of Section seven A of Basic Law of the Knesset.

That law allows the Central Elections Committee to bar a party or candidate for three reasons.

And here we run into some inconsistencies.

Since the enactment of seven A in nineteen eighty-five, the court has not upheld the disqualification of an Arab candidate.

It allowed Azmi Bishara to run in 2003.

It allowed Haneen Zoabi to run in 2013 and 2015 after she had sailed on the Mavi Marmara flotilla and later said the men who kidnapped three Israeli teenagers were, quote, not terrorists.