On Tuesday night, Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit handed the Central Elections Committee his recommendations regarding requests that certain parties and/or candidates be disqualified from the election for the 22nd Knesset. Any decision to disqualify a candidate automatically moves to the Supreme Court for a final decision.
Mendelblit agreed that far-right activists Baruch Marzel and Ben-Zion Gopstein be barred from the election. However, he did not agree that Otzma Yehudit leader Itamar Ben-Gvir, or his party, should be disqualified.
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The attorney general also recommended that the committee reject petitions to disqualify Yesh Atid and the Joint Arab List.
MK Esawi Frej (Democratic Union), the Israel Religious Action Center, and the Labor party all petitioned that Otzma Yehudit, as well as individual candidates Ben-Gvir, Gopstein, and Marzel, be banned from the election.
According to Mendelblit, more evidence was presented against Ben-Gvir than was submitted in a petition to disqualify him in April. Mendelblit said that Ben-Gvir was closer to the "red line" than he was in the previous election, but that the material presented against him was insufficient to support the request to keep him from running for the Knesset.
However, Mendelblit said that when it came to Marzel and Gopstein, material submitted against them presented a "clear picture of incitement to racism on their part."
"There is no doubt that Marzel and Gopstein have crossed the line and are 'deep' in forbidden territory," Mendelblit wrote.
The Otzma Yehudit party itself, Mendelblit wrote, has not yet crossed the line that would justify keeping it out of the election.
"The party platform itself does not justify the disqualification of the party, and that doesn't change even when we take into account its leaders' remarks," the attorney general wrote.
Otzma Yehudit and Ben-Gvir each submitted petitions against Yesh Atid, which Mendelblit recommended be rejected out of hand, because the petition was directed at the party itself, not its candidate list, and because Blue and White – which includes Yesh Atid and the party of Benny Gantz – was not included in the petition.
Mendelblit said that even if the petition had included Blue and White, there was very little material to support disqualifying the party.
In addition, Ben-Gvir and Otzma Yehudit petitioned to exclude the Joint Arab List from the election, a request that Mendelblit recommended the Central Elections Committee ignore, due to a lack of sufficient evidence to justify the petition.
