Banning political parties in Israel and the true test of democracy - by Jonathan S. Tobin

Is the Israeli Supreme Court really prepared to say that racist and undemocratic parties are out of the question unless they are ethnically Arab in character?

Jonathan S. Tobin..
JNS.org..
26 February '19

If the parties of the left had their way prior to last week, it would have spared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a lot of the trouble he got into over the deal to merge two right-wing parties. By helping to bring together the Jewish Home Party with the Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) Party, which is led by followers of the late extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane, he may have increased his chances of winning the next Knesset election on April 9. But by making it also likely that a Kahanist-like Otzma leader Michael Ben-Ari makes it into the Knesset, he stood accused of enabling racism.

Yet according to the Labor and Meretz parties, Otzma shouldn’t be allowed to run at all, whether with its new partner or on its own. The two left-wing parties have filed petitions with the Central Elections Committee seeking to get Otzma off the ballot on the grounds that it is racist and opposes the basic democratic principles of the state. Some have also raised the question of Otzma receiving funding from a yeshivah founded by Kahane that is considered by the U.S. State Department to be part of a terrorist organization.

It’s far from clear if the committee will look favorably on their petition or if an activist Israeli Supreme Court will intervene if they have the chance to oust Otzma. But it calls to mind the original effort to ban Kahane from the Knesset and raises the question of whether this exercise is a defense of democracy or, in fact, undermines it.

(Continue to Full Column)

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