Posted on 03/17/19
| News Source: Reuters
Jerusalem - Israel’s top court disqualified on Sunday a far-right candidate from next month’s national ballot and approved the candidacy of an Arab party, overturning March 6 decisions by the election board, a court statement said.
The Central Elections Committee had voted to bar the joint Arab party Raam-Balad from the election in accordance with a motion filed by conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party. Likud claims the Balad faction wants to eliminate Israel as a Jewish state and backs Palestinian and Lebanese militants.
Raam-Balad describes itself as a democratic movement opposed to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory.
“We have a fierce argument with Zionism,” Mansour Abbas, who heads the Raam faction, told Reuters.
Raam-Balad now holds eight of parliament’s 120 seats. Candidates of other parties representing Israel’s 20 percent Arab minority remain eligible to run.
The elections committee had also approved extreme-right Jewish Power’s Michael Ben-Ari to run in the April polls, but the opposition left-wing Meretz party successfully appealed the decision to the supreme court.
Ben-Ari has come under fire for comments he made about Israeli Arabs, which Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit said earlier this month amount to “incitement to racism.”
Facing a corruption case and a merger of centrist parties that could defeat him, the conservative Netanyahu has allied with an ultra-nationalist list that includes the Jewish Power party to boost his chances.
His alliance has brought rare censure from the U.S. pro-Israel lobby and normally staunch Netanyahu backer AIPAC, which called Jewish Power a “racist and reprehensible party.”
Jewish Power leaders call themselves successors to Kahane, a U.S.-born rabbi who served one term in parliament in the 1980s before his Kach party was banned by Israel as racist.
Washington branded the party a terrorist organization. Read more at Reuters