Should Balad Chair Sami Abu Shehadeh Be Barred From Israel’s Elections?
Israel’s attorney general says evidence appears to indicate support for the armed struggle of a terrorist organization. Abu Shehadeh denies supporting Hamas or the October 7 attack. The original Arabic article at the center of the case is more complicated than either description alone.
Israel’s Central Elections Committee is being asked to decide whether Sami Abu Shehadeh, chairman of the Arab nationalist Balad party and a candidate in the October 27 Knesset election, should be barred from running.
The immediate trigger is unusual. Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara and State Attorney Amit Aisman have not recommended that Abu Shehadeh be disqualified. But they have also not urged the committee to reject the petition against him.
Instead, according to their September 22 submission as reproduced by Ynet, they said the evidence, primarily an article Abu Shehadeh published on October 8, 2023, “appears prima facie” to indicate that he expressed support for the armed struggle of a terrorist organization against Israel. They said the Central Elections Committee should carefully consider the petition under the relevant legal standards and in light of Abu Shehadeh’s response.
That distinction matters. There has been no finding that Abu Shehadeh supported Hamas, no ruling that he supported the October 7 massacre, and no decision yet to bar him from the election.
The question is whether his own words cross the much narrower legal line established by Section 7A of Basic Law: The Knesset.
What did Abu Shehadeh actually write?
The article at the center of the case is no longer difficult to examine. It remains available in full on the Arabic-language newspaper Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.
Published on October 8, 2023 under the title “Al-Aqsa Flood: Initial Observations,” it was written while fighting was still underway.
Its opening is among the passages likely to receive the most attention.
Abu Shehadeh described what had begun the previous morning as “an important historical event in the military, political and strategic sense.”
That is significant language. But it is not the same as an explicit statement supporting the massacre of civilians.
The distinction runs throughout the article.
Abu Shehadeh argued that decades of occupation, blockade, assassinations and killing had created pressure that would eventually produce what he called a Palestinian “reaction.” He criticized what he described as Israel’s dehumanization of Palestinians and defended Palestinian aspirations for liberation and statehood.
More consequential for the disqualification case is what he wrote about the operational surprise.
He argued that October 7 demonstrated that Israeli intelligence was fallible and that political movements and states could prevent Israeli intelligence penetration if properly organized. He then wrote that if small and blockaded Gaza could accomplish this, others could potentially do so more effectively.
There is room for disagreement over exactly what “this” refers to.
The closest context concerns secrecy, intelligence penetration and surprise. But the broader subject is plainly the operation that had just overwhelmed Israel’s defenses.
That makes the passage relevant to the petition without turning it automatically into an endorsement of everything Hamas did that day.
He also addressed “the resistance” directly
The final section of Abu Shehadeh’s article is particularly important because it complicates simple descriptions of the piece as either an endorsement of violence or a call for peace.
Abu Shehadeh wrote that “the resistance” should involve the Palestine Liberation Organization and important Arab states in the political process produced by the fighting. He argued that coordination should begin to end the fighting with as few losses as possible while pursuing political objectives. Excluding other Palestinian and Arab actors, he wrote, would prolong the conflict and increase losses.
This was political and strategic advice directed at an actor he called “the resistance.”
But it was not tactical military advice. Nor did he explicitly call for additional attacks.
The article does not say “I support Hamas.” It does not praise the killing of civilians, defend hostage taking, celebrate the Nova massacre or call for another October 7 attack.
It also does not simply call for an unconditional end to the fighting. Abu Shehadeh wrote about converting the confrontation into political gains while ending it with fewer losses.
Both parts of that record matter.
What was known when the article was written?
Abu Shehadeh now says that publishing the article was a mistake and that he would not have done so had he understood the extent of the atrocities.
There is an important distinction here too.
The full scale of October 7 was indeed still emerging on October 8. Final casualty figures, the identities of many victims and hostages, and the detailed accounts from individual communities were not yet known.
But the basic nature of the attack was already public.
Reuters reported on October 7 that armed Hamas attackers had entered Israeli communities, that bodies had been seen in Sderot, that Israeli media were already reporting at least 100 people killed, that Israel’s Foreign Ministry said gunmen had gone house to house killing civilians, and that captives had been taken into Gaza.
The precise publication time of Abu Shehadeh’s article on October 8 has not been established, so it would be impossible to determine exactly which additional reports were public before he wrote it.
The careful conclusion is therefore narrower: the complete extent of the atrocities was not yet known, but a mass casualty attack involving civilians and abductions was already publicly known.
That does not establish what Abu Shehadeh personally knew at the moment he wrote the article.
Abu Shehadeh says he opposed attacks on civilians
Abu Shehadeh’s formal response rejects the claim that he supports violence as a political method.
Adalah, which represents him, says he has repeatedly condemned harm to innocent civilians, Jewish and Arab, and has advocated a political solution based on justice and equality. His response also argues that his political record does not demonstrate the sustained support for armed struggle required for disqualification.
A lengthy interview he gave one day after the disputed article also matters.
In that October 9 interview, Abu Shehadeh used approving language about Gaza’s ability to surprise Israel and referred to Palestinian armed activity using the language of “resistance.” But he also said innocent Palestinians and Israelis should not be harmed, expressed hope that the fighting would end quickly, and advocated an eventual political settlement.
That combination is one reason the legal issue cannot be reduced to a single viral quotation.
What does Israeli law require?
Section 7A of Basic Law: The Knesset allows an individual candidate to be disqualified if his actions, including his expressions, explicitly or implicitly contain one of several prohibited elements. One is support for an armed struggle by an enemy state or terrorist organization against Israel.
But Israeli Supreme Court precedent has interpreted that power narrowly.
In the 2020 Heba Yazbak case, for example, the Supreme Court overturned a Central Elections Committee decision barring her candidacy despite controversial posts that appeared to praise people involved in terrorism. The majority found there was not a sufficient “critical mass” of clear and convincing evidence and had not been shown that the disputed positions were a central feature of her political activity.
The court similarly overturned the Central Elections Committee’s 2012 decision to disqualify Balad MK Haneen Zoabi. In its later reasoning, the court emphasized the exceptional nature of excluding someone from elections and found the evidence insufficient to establish support for armed struggle.
The established test therefore asks more than whether a statement was offensive, inflammatory or politically objectionable. Courts have looked for clear evidence, a sufficiently substantial evidentiary record, and indications that the prohibited position is central rather than isolated.
There is another safeguard. If the Central Elections Committee votes to bar an individual candidate, its decision does not itself remove that candidate from the election. Section 7A requires the disqualification to be approved by the Supreme Court.
What the committee now has to decide
The petition against Abu Shehadeh therefore turns on something more precise than whether his October 8 article deserves condemnation.
The committee must determine whether describing the operation as historically important, positively assessing Gaza’s intelligence and operational surprise, referring approvingly to Palestinian “resistance,” and advising that resistance on converting the fighting into political gains amount to support for the armed struggle of a terrorist organization.
It must also consider the other evidence submitted by the petitioners, Abu Shehadeh’s later statements, his rejection of attacks on civilians, his explanation of what he intended, and whether the overall record demonstrates the sustained and central support required by Supreme Court precedent.
Some descriptions of the case go further than the verified record.
Saying that Abu Shehadeh “supported the October 7 massacre” presents a disputed inference as established fact. His article does not expressly endorse civilian murder.
Saying that the attorney general “recommended banning him” is also inaccurate. Baharav-Miara and Aisman said the evidence appears on its face to raise the statutory ground and told the committee to examine the request carefully. They stopped short of telling it what decision to reach.
But minimizing the language in Abu Shehadeh’s article would be equally incomplete. He did not merely discuss Palestinian grievances. He positively assessed aspects of the operation’s success, spoke of a strong and resisting Palestinian, and addressed “the resistance” as an actor that should use the confrontation to pursue political objectives.
That is the evidence the Central Elections Committee now has to measure against Section 7A.
And if it decides that the threshold has been crossed, the Supreme Court will still have to decide whether Israeli law permits Abu Shehadeh to be removed from the ballot.
The Central Elections Committee is scheduled to begin hearing the disqualification petitions on September 23. Israel’s election for the 26th Knesset is scheduled for October 27, 2026.
