Hadash

If this democracy is to survive, we're going to have to ban every party except for ours.

Israel's Central Election Committee voted Wednesday to disqualify Mansur Abbas's United Arab List slate from running in the election, as well as the joint list, which consists of the parties of Hadash, Tal, and Balad.

The vote came after left-wing Knesset member Ofer Kasif of the Arab-Jewish Hadash Party and Balad chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh were banned earlier the same day.

These decisions may be reversed by appeal to the High Court of Justice.

Remember, there's no written constitution for the Israelis.

If this democracy is to survive, we're going to have to ban every party except for ours.

Israel's Central Election Committee voted Wednesday to disqualify Mansur Abbas's United Arab List slate from running in the election, as well as the joint list, which consists of the parties of Hadash, Tal, and Balad.

The vote came after left-wing Knesset member Ofer Kasif of the Arab-Jewish Hadash Party and Balad chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh were banned earlier the same day.

These decisions may be reversed by appeal to the High Court of Justice.

Remember, there's no written constitution for the Israelis.

The decisions need final approval by the Supreme Court.

Ofer Kasif is a member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, and he represents the Hadash party and the Joint List, which the commission is banning from next month's elections.

We spoke to him earlier.

He says the disqualification is politically motivated.

0.9%, just short of the 1% threshold.

Then, 1977, Charlie Byton ran on the Hadash list, re-elected three times, and in 1990 he established the Black Panthers as an independent Nasset faction.

Some leaders later joined Tammy and Shass.

The movement helped raise the Mizrahi question and influenced the rise of the Kud among Mizrahi voters.

And this was, of course, their response to that was to support, you know, not officially support the Stabbers, but to support the Palestinians.

Many of their founders come from Hadash.

It's a party in Israel which stands for Hazit Demokrati Tshivyonit.

how do I translate that, equalitarian democratic front or something to that effect, and from a party within that party, a party called MAKI, Miflaga Komunistita Israelit, which you can probably translate on your own, and it is what it sounds like.

Then he became a parliamentary advisor and spokesman to a member of Knesset, Dov Hanin.

People who are familiar with Israeli politics will know who that is.

People who aren't, I will tell you he is from Hadash.

If you've been paying attention, that is the...

The Ben-Gvir Jewish Power brief also says that NGOs affiliated with Abbas and Ra'am give financial support to Hamas and that Ra'am has ideological ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The second and third petitions were filed just after Rosh Hashanah by the Likud against both Ra'am and the Joint List, the Joint List being a consortium of two secular Arab political parties, Ta'al and Balad, and one ostensibly communist, ostensibly joint Jewish-Arab parties Hadash.

This brief argues that neither of these lists and none of the four parties they contain between them, quote, "are capable of defining Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations," end quote, making these parties unsuitable to stand for elections, according to the lawyers and politicians of the Likud.

What's more, the briefs say each of the parties supports policies that aim to harm IDF soldiers.

The fourth petition was filed by a group of bereaved families called the Choosing Life Forum against Ra'am for their alleged financial leaks to a group called Aid 48, which allegedly funnels money to Hamas that Hamas uses to buy weapons to kill Israelis.

The fifth petition was filed on Monday by the Yisrael Beiteinu party and its faction whip, Oded Forer, against the sole Jewish candidate of the Hadash party, Ofer Cassif, a Tel Aviv University political philosopher with an LSE dissertation called On Nationalism and Democracy: A Marxist Examination, whose testimony against Israel in the International Court of Justice is justification, according to the brief, for stripping Ofer Cassif of his standing to serve in the Knesset.

Now, we can very safely predict that no party or MK will ultimately be disqualified because of any of these five petitions.

The Central Election Committee has sometimes supported petitions to ban Arab parties, but at least ever since 1965, these bans have always been overturned by the Supreme Court.