In preliminary reading: Terror supporters definition widened to nix them from Knesset

The emendation of the Basic Law: The Knesset is a legislative answer to Supreme Court rulings allowing extremist Arabs to run. 

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The Knesset passed the preliminary reading of an amendment to a Basic Law Wednesday that widens the definition of who is a terror supporter so that extremists can be more easily banned from running for parliament.

The new grounds for disqualification to be embedded in Basic Law: The Knesset include expressing support for an individual terrorist, contrary to the existing law that only speaks of support for a terrorist organization.

A few statements will now be enough, whereas before it was necessary to have a “critical mass” of statements or actions exhibiting approval or sympathy for nationalist crimes.

In addition, a party of terror sympathizers within a combined list will no longer be protected by its fellow factions that do not express such sentiments.

Finally, confirmation of the Knesset Elections Committee’s disqualification will not require Supreme Court approval as has been the case until now, although it will be able to hear appeals.

Coalition head Ophir Katz authored the changes after years of the Supreme Court overruling the Committee’s decisions to disallow certain Arab Israeli lists or individuals due to their support of Palestinian terrorism.

The bill passed 61-35, but not before an uproar had ensued in the plenum when Minister of Social Equality and the Advancement of the Status of Women May Golan presented the government’s support for Katz’s private bill.

She called out the Arab legislators in general for being “agents of our enemies” and “Palestinian collaborators,” and quoted individual MKs’ past statements that would disqualify them once the amendment passes into law.

These included Hadash MK Aida Touma-Suleiman’s saying that she would not call Hamas a terror organization, and her party leader, Ayman Odeh, praising longtime Hezbollah terror chief Hassan Nasrallah as a “model of self-sacrifice” after the IDF assassinated him in his Beirut bunker several weeks ago.

Golan was called to order several times by the acting speaker of the Knesset for calling MKs insulting names from the podium, and he eventually had her removed from the hall by Knesset ushers.

All except one member of Yesh Atid voted against the bill, with party head Yair Lapid attacking it as a “racist” law “that says ‘We lost ten seats on October 7 so we’ll use the Knesset to subtract ten seats in our favor…. The real name of the law is the ‘Law for the Abolition of the Opposition.’”

Katz expressed satisfaction over his bill’s passing its first legislative hurdle.

“There is no other country in the world that would allow terror supporters to act as members of Parliament, and I say to the Supreme Court judges, the nation is not taking this anymore,” he said. “Do you think these decisions make you more enlightened than us? More liberal? More advanced? You are not. No more awards for terrorism, that will change from now on.”

The bill will now go to committee to be refined before returning for its second and third readings.