Israel’s top court struck down a decision to disqualify an Arab politician who appears to support terrorists from running in next month’s parliamentary election.
By World Israel News Staff, AP and TPS
The Israeli Supreme Court voted 5-4 on Sunday to overturn the Central Elections Committee’s ruling to bar Heba Yazbak, a lawmaker from the Arab Balad party, saying there was no legal basis for Yazbak’s disqualification.
In May 2015, Yazbak, of the Joint List, shared a photo of Samir Kunter and praised him as a “martyred warrior” who died while waging Jihad.
Kuntar participated in the 1979 nighttime attack in Nahariya in which he murdered a policeman and then abducted Danny Haran and his daughter Einat and later murdered them both on the beach. Haran’s wife, who hid from Kuntar, accidentally smothered her younger daughter to death while trying to prevent her from crying out and giving away their hiding spot.
According to eyewitnesses, Kuntar shot Haran, 31, and then killed Einat by smashing her skull against the rocks with his rile butt.
“The martyr fighter Samir Kuntar,” Yazbak wrote after the terrorist was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Syria.
Yazbak, an outspoken advocate critic of Israel’s “occupation” of Judea and Samaria, welcomed the court’s decision. She claimed that her disqualification had been “populist political persecution” with “no legal evidence.”
In a recent interview with Channel 13, Times of Israel reported, Yazbak said that “International law permits people under occupation to take action to liberate themselves.” When the interviewer pressed her and asked if she considered attacks on soldiers to be legitimate resistance she replied, “What isn’t legitimate is the continued occupation.”
Adalah, a legal advocacy group that claims the State of Israel discriminates against its Arab minority, said in response to the decision that Yazbak’s disqualification had “one sole purpose: To delegitimize and demonize the political representation of Palestinian citizens of Israel.”
Israel is heading into its third parliamentary election in under a year on March 2 after two inconclusive votes in April and September 2019.