Opinion & Analysis
Israel's coalition can depress Arab turnout by simply filing disqualification petitions
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The campaign to strike Arab parties from Israel's ballot has a losing record and keeps being run anyway. That is not a contradiction. It is the design.
Ynet's legal affairs correspondent Tova Zimuky reported this weekend that the coalition's factions are preparing persistent attempts to disqualify Arab lists and candidates before 27 October, with Mansour Abbas's Ra'am the principal target. The petitions will go to the Central Elections Committee, a body composed by Knesset arithmetic, where the outgoing coalition holds the majority.
Almost every disqualification of an Arab list in Israel's history has been overturned by the Supreme Court. The people filing know that. They file regardless, because the ruling is not the product.
What the process itself does#
Consider the two months a petition occupies. A party has to answer it, and answering means arguing about its own right to exist rather than about housing, policing or the Naqab. Its leaders spend September in a courtroom register instead of a canvassing register.
Voters watch that and draw the conclusion the process invites: that their vote is provisional, contingent on a committee's mood, and possibly wasted. In a community whose turnout has swung by twenty points between elections, that impression is worth more seats than any petition could remove.
Amir Fuchs of the Israel Democracy Institute told Ynet the essential fact about the venue: the disqualifying body is political in composition, its decisions can turn on political rather than legal considerations, and it is under no duty to give reasons. A body that need not explain itself is a body that cannot be argued with in public, only appealed from.
The seats both blocs are counting#
The arithmetic gives the manoeuvre its value. Maariv's own analyst wrote this week that a strengthening Joint List is lifting turnout in Arab society, and every published poll this month has the two Jewish blocs close enough that Palestinian voters decide which one forms a government.
Depressing that turnout by five points does more for the coalition than removing a single candidate, and it costs nothing, and no court can reverse it.
Palestinian citizens of Israel have been here before, and their answer has been consistent: register, run, appeal, vote. The Follow-Up Committee and the lists have treated participation as a claim on the state rather than an endorsement of it.
What is different in 2026 is that the coalition has also pursued an amendment to Article 7A of Basic Law: The Knesset, which would loosen the evidence a disqualification requires. If that route ever closes the gap between filing and winning, the calculation described here stops being about deterrence and starts being about exclusion.
Until then the paper's readers should hold two things at once. The petitions will probably fail. They are working.
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