On Thursday, October 1, Sami Abu Shehadeh appeared before a nine-justice panel of Israel’s Supreme Court in Jerusalem to contest his disqualification from running on the Joint List slate in the October 27 Israeli election. The petition against him had been filed by the Jewish Power Party (Otzma Yehudit), a Kahanist party led by Israel’s hardline National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who argued the case in person. It won the backing of the Central Elections Committee by a margin of roughly 30 to 4, with support from the attorney general and from parties across the Zionist opposition. The attempt to exclude Arab political representation is increasingly becoming a staple of Israeli politics, as political parties outdo each other in policies designed to symbolically and politically discipline Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Abu Shehadeh is a Palestinian native of Jaffa, a city largely destroyed and emptied of its Palestinian population in the 1948 Nakba, when Zionist militias conducted a widespread ethnic cleansing campaign. He is also the leader of the Balad party, a Palestinian political formation that believes in one democratic state for all peoples between the river and the sea. In the wake of “Operation al-Aqsa Flood” (Tufan al-Aqsa) on October 7, 2023, Abu Shehadeh wrote a short article in the regional Arab newspaper al-Araby al-Jadeed, focusing on the operation’s strategic and political reverberations. The article emphasizes common-sense views that highlight Israel’s racialized discourse, its vengeance economy, the similarities between the surprise of October 7 and the Egyptian crossing of the Suez Canal in 1973, and the political possibilities emergent, in part, due to an event that broke the military and political impasse in Gaza. It speaks of the law of physics that every action produces a reaction, and of history not having started on that fateful Saturday morning.
In the words of its president, Isaac Amit, the Israeli Supreme Court found the article “painful, outrageous, and repugnant,” while acknowledging that the justices differed on its legal implications. The court then asked Abu Shehadeh to withdraw from the race voluntarily, sparing it the need to issue a reasoned ruling. But it was the scene that, perhaps more than anything, encapsulates the humiliation to which Abu Shehadeh was subjected. Here was a Palestinian historian from Jaffa, well aware of the long history of Israeli and Zionist trigger-happy massacres, ethnic cleansing, racist discourse, and sadistic policies, including a carceral regime whose intended purpose is now to force Palestinians to emerge from prison having lost tens of kilograms. Here he was, standing before the law, recanting and justifying an article, and fighting to enter a parliament where he would have had to swear allegiance to a “state” that broke his world.
The dehumanization of Palestinians as political commonsense
The old argument for participation in the Israeli parliament has found new life in the wake of the genocide. Palestinians in Israel speak of the need to stop Israeli rightwing fascism, to secure a new government coalition in which Arab parties could play a role, and to win concessions, specifically around the growing crime syndicates in Palestinian communities inside Israel, as well putting in place a more pliable Israeli government willing to soften its sadism and expand budgets for Palestinian municipalities and local councils (for villages and towns inside Israel). This is a political program that increasingly dismembers Palestinians inside Israel from their history and memory on account of their present conditions. In this sense, the trial was not only that of a Palestinian standing in the presence of an organ that safeguards Israeli Jewish supremacy through the language of legal decorum; it was also that of Sami Abu Shehadeh standing between his history and his present, a self divided against itself and willing to exchange a captive present for its history and memory.
What makes the trial of Sami Abu Shehadeh difficult to dismiss, moreover, is the striking convergence between the electoral strategy of Israel’s right-wing coalition and that pursued by Republicans and centrist Democrats in the United States — the attempt to define the legitimate boundary of political belonging and, by extension, permissible political discourse. The same is also facing Elif Erlap in Berlin in the wake of her strong showing in the September elections. In Israel, however, this strategy has acquired a particular force because the political dehumanization and ostracisation of Palestinian politicians has been allowed to assume the status of something approaching political commonsense, and has not been met by any significant resistance from within Jewish-Israeli society.
The silence and complicity of all major Jewish-Israeli political forces could also serve as a basis for judging Palestinian participation in Israeli elections.
In terms of yielding socio-economic gains, the results of participating are meager for Palestinian communities inside Israel — while coming at a high symbolic and political cost. A part of that cost is how Israel uses it as a propaganda tool, pointing to the participation of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship in parliament as a sign of its “Jewish and democratic” character, even though the legal, symbolic, and political terms suggest that they are included only to be excluded. Participation by Palestinian political parties has historically been contested, and major boycott campaigns have accompanied each round of elections.
The charitable rendition of the argument for joining elections would stress the need for wide participation by highlighting that the right-wing Israeli coalition is itself fearful of a large Arab showing in the election, one that would reduce its seat share and make it almost impossible for the government that led Israel over the past four years to return to power. But what is more interesting for our purposes here is what it means to “stand before the law” for a Palestinian political leader who is willing to denounce himself in the name of a present that he does not meaningfully influence.
The tragedy here is Abu Shehadeh’s complicity in his own fate. He recants the article that he wrote “before the law,” he condemns the Palestinian resistance “before the law,” and he even speaks of being against everything Hamas did, including the supposed systematic mass rape of Israelis – the occurrence of which is widely contested – “before the law.” He looks shaky, and he grants license and legitimacy to a court that, as he was well aware before entering its gate, was geared to exclude him from running in the election. He even agrees to withdraw his candidacy, enabling mainstream media headlines in the West not to speak of a ban on Palestinian politicians in supposedly democratic Israel, but to speak of the withdrawal of a Palestinian politician from running in elections.
Redefining citizenship
What is being redefined here, in part through these legal and political maneuvers, is nothing less than the substance of citizenship itself. It is no longer enough for a Palestinian in Israel to pledge an oath to the state in order to be worthy of standing ineffectively, as an empty symbolic shell, in the Knesset; he must also go through the motions of reflexively condemning every act that any Palestinian commits in resisting the occupation. It is not enough to secure a seat in the Knesset, to speak Hebrew, to stand in solemn quiet while facing an Israeli flag and listening to the Hatikvah (Israel’s national anthem), to abide by its rules and procedures, and to submit oneself to questioning by its judges.
Beyond all that, a Palestinian citizen of Israel must now surrender his memory and live in amnesia. Abu Shehadeh was permitted to speak before the law only when the terms of speaking were already set by a state angrier at an analytical article that names the resistance as resistance than at the moral corruption at the core of the state, which has led it openly to destroy the lives of millions. Abu Shehadeh confessed, as a Palestinian confesses in the presence of an interrogator from Israeli intelligence – and he was excluded anyway.
In part, Abu Shehadeh’s mistake is that he uttered what the settler has always suspected: that the natives of the land, even when they recognize Israel and live side by side with it in everyday life, are ultimately captives, and that upon any sign of a radical change in the power dynamics, they will show their true colors. To write an article that speaks of the political possibilities in the wake of the Tufan and to insist on treating the operation as a symptom of Israeli policy is proof of guilt. It is in the moment of Israel’s shaking to its core that the truth of the native comes out.
What the settler has always suspected appeared to be confirmed by the shock of October 7 and the article Abu Shehadeh wrote, and so the native was summoned “before the law” to be condemned. The court’s task is to stage the discovery and to convert the settler’s suspicion into a procedure that would permit Abu Shehadeh to exclude himself.
Yes, the presence of Arabs as a whole remains a demographic fact that is to be managed and permitted a semblance of political participation, but the Arab at the individual level must be “disciplined” for daring to think that the world might be otherwise.
To be a citizen willing to trade history and memory for the pragmatic needs of the present is still to be held as a suspect. It is to be told that the door is open, only to discover it was never meant for you to pass through. In Kafka’s parable, Josef K. waits at the gate until he dies. The Palestinian citizen is asked to confess at the gate, and then informed that he should commit suicide. Israel was never meant to include Palestinians -it was always meant to exclude them through their inclusion, or to include them through exclusion, until the time comes to “finish the job.”
