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Condoms and tikkun olam: An Orthodox woman strives to aid sex workers in Prague
PRAGUE (JTA) — Not long after she puts away her silver Shabbat candlesticks and home-baked challah, Yael Schoultz walks through a cavernous hallway, and up a set of gray concrete stairs. Past a door, she finds a group of heavily made-up women in red and black G-strings and spike heels, listlessly beckoning men for sex in return for cash.
Schoultz, 43, spotted about 30 women at the Prague brothel floating from room to room in various states of undress — negligees, see-through bras — with accents as varied as their lipstick shades. Some are smiling, some appear bored as they play games on their phones, others are trying to woo potential clients with a simple, “Come have a good time, come to my room.”
It’s a typical Saturday night post-Shabbat routine for Schoultz, an Orthodox Jewish South African who recently launched L’Chaim, an organization dedicated to helping sex workers in the Czech Republic.
Schoultz and her colleagues engage the women with friendly banter about health and the weather, careful not to interrupt those with customers. The L’Chaim volunteers collectively carry a few hundred free condoms along with high-end soaps and hand-crafted bracelets.
“The girls always ask for extras for their friends,” Schoultz said.
Schoultz, who has been visiting Czech brothels since she moved to Prague in 2011, is not a mere purveyor of gifts. Her goal is to establish a rapport with the women she meets so that they can leave the business of sex work if they so wish. And her Jewish faith is a core driver of Schoultz’s quest to provide a better life for the sex workers.
“Some of the women have been trafficked,” she explained, referring to the term governments and human rights advocates use to describe a contemporary form of slavery. “There are girls who were tied up for days and raped, even by the police. Some might seem to be in the brothel voluntarily, but not really, because they owe a lot of money on a debt and feel sex work is only way they can pay it back.”
Dressed in black from head to toe, in what a fashion magazine might describe as modest goth, Schoultz is a veteran of global anti-trafficking efforts. A few decades ago, while teaching English in South Korea, Schoultz volunteered for an organization that was trying to stop the trafficking of North Korean women to China. At the same time, she was getting a master’s in theology and wanted to move to Europe to get her doctorate, which was possible at Prague’s Charles University.
“When I got to the Czech Republic, I started looking for people who were working on the trafficking issue and found three women: a Catholic nun and two Protestant missionaries. All of them were in their 60s,” Schoultz said.
Schoultz asked if she could join them in their visits to brothels.
“I just went in and started talking to women, about really anything. Language wasn’t a barrier because most sex workers speak English,” she recalled. “But it was a bit weird walking into these places with a nun in full habit.”
After a few months Schoultz began to feel uncomfortable — not with the sex workers, but with her philanthropic colleagues’ proselytizing and “religious agenda.”
“I wasn’t interested in giving out Virgin Mary medallions,” she said.
Schoultz, who teaches English at an international school in Prague, started her own informal volunteer group to help sex workers in 2012, while also embarking on a deeply personal Jewish journey.
Although she believes her father has “Jewish ancestry,” Schoultz was brought up in a Protestant home. Still, she long maintained a deep interest and connection to Judaism which intensified when she pursued her studies in theology. For several years, she regularly attended Orthodox services at 13th-century Old New Synagogue and volunteered for the Prague Jewish Community’s social services department before completing an Orthodox conversion in 2020 with Israeli rabbi David Bohbot. She has now begun her master’s degree in Jewish Studies at the Ashkenazium in Budapest, a division of the secular Milton Friedman University operated by the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement.
“From the beginning when I knew I wanted to make the conversion, Orthodox Judaism was something I agreed with theologically, it is where I felt most comfortable,” said Shoultz, who describes herself as Modern Orthodox.
Rabbi Dohbot praised Schoultz’s dedication. “This work she does is noble, and isn’t that what most big religions are based on? Showing love and respect for others?” he said.
Schoultz completed an Orthodox conversion to Judaism in 2020. (Courtesy of Schoultz)
Last year, Schoultz achieved another transitional milestone: obtaining Czech government recognition of L’Chaim as a registered nonprofit.
Although L’Chaim is a secular organization, Schoultz sees her work through the lens of tikkun olam, the rabbinical command to repair the world.
“I feel like as a Jewish person, you’re supposed to bring light to the world,” said Schoultz. “And the sex industry is very dark, because even if you choose to be a sex worker, it’s not a job that anybody really enjoys as the customers are often drunk or abusive.”
“It might sound strange, but I feel very connected to Hashem when I am in the brothel, because he is there for me, and for these women too,” she added, using the preferred Orthodox Hebrew term for god.
Schoultz’s co-volunteers, who are mostly not Jewish, are aware of her commitment to the faith.
“After Yael started getting serious about Judaism, she found her path, she was more complete and found her purpose,” said Natalia Synelnykova, who worked with Schoultz to launch L’Chaim. “Everyone would say that their friends are unique, but I have rarely met someone who is so human-centered as Yael, and that is definitely linked to how she sees Judaism.”
Schoultz named her new organization L’Chaim — to life, in Hebrew — as a message to those she seeks to help.
“We want the women in the brothels to have a life because a lot of them feel like they don’t have any life, like they’re barely making it,” she said.
There are about 100 brothels in Prague, according to media reports, and roughly 13,0000 sex workers in the Czech Republic, of which about half are thought to be single mothers. Although sex work is legal, pimping is not, so the brothels operate in a murky legal area that legislators have been trying to address for decades.
Once a hotspot for human trafficking, today the Czech Republic has a relatively low rate of human sex slavery according to government statistics. But Schoultz said the numbers are misleading.
“No one really knows how many trafficked women there are in the country,” she said.
A U.S. State Department report praised the Czech Republic’s efforts to limit trafficking but also noted that the country is more focused on prosecutions of criminals rather than on helping victims. Their stories stay with Schoultz.
“I meet many Nigerian women who may not be locked up in a room, but they are locked up by Juju,” she said, referring to a form of “black magic” that some Nigerian traffickers reportedly use to scare women into prostitution.
She also counsels “Romanian girls who are initially romanced by men that turn out to be traffickers.” A man will have many women he calls “wives,” and each one has a baby with him, “The women give him all their money to support the baby who he keeps as a form of collateral in Romania,” Schoultz said.
(Shoultz turned down JTA’s request for contacts of sex workers she has helped, noting that this would violate L’Chaim’s promise of confidentiality).
The Czech Republic’s leading anti-trafficking organization, La Strada, takes a different orientation towards sex work than L’Chaim, focusing on it more as a legitimate profession that should be organized and regulated.
“We believe women are fully able to decide for themselves if they want to be sex workers and our goal is to provide safety for those who do so, to help them organize, fight stigma and have the rights of all other workers,” said Marketa Hronkova, La Strada’s director. La Strada defines trafficking strictly as those who are physically coerced or blackmailed into providing labor.
Hronkova said there are many sex workers who choose their profession willingly and that it is patronizing and often damaging when those who say they want to help focus exclusively on “pushing women to exit a path they have chosen, as if they have no minds of their own.”
The alternative to sex work, for a single mother, can often put her in an even worse financial situation, she noted. “Our goal is to make sex work safe, not to get women to stop doing it,” said Hromkova.
Concerning L’Chaim, she said as long as its aim was listening to women, and not making them feel ashamed, it could be helpful. La Strada already cooperates with another Czech organization, Pleasure Without Risk, which maintains a neutral stance towards sex work and provides women with access to testing for sexually transmitted diseases as well as counseling.
L’Chaim’s goal, Schoultz explained, is to identify who might be trafficked and provide them with the confidence and practical resources to rebuild their lives. But since getting access to the women requires earning the trust of brothel owners and managers, L’Chaim doesn’t advertise itself as an anti-trafficking group.
“We show up as providing support to women in prostitution, that gets us in the door,” she reflected. L’Chaim has about a dozen volunteers.
It can take Schoultz six months of relationship building before she finds out what brought the client into sex work.
“We start by talking about her kids, talking about her dogs,” said Schoultz “and eventually their stories come out, many involving abuse, trauma and mental health problems.”
She estimated that at the 13 or so brothels she regularly visits in Prague and Brno, at least half the sex workers were not there on a fully voluntary basis.
In the future, Schoultz hopes to create trafficking awareness campaigns and help the customers of sex workers recognize the signs that a woman is working against her will.
The brothel owners are not always pleasant to deal with, Scholtz acknowledged.
“At one place an owner came behind me and kissed my neck on the back of my neck. It was really creepy,” she said.
And despite her modest dress, or tznius, in keeping with her Orthodox values, she said she was pursued by a brothel customer to participate in “group sex.” She fended him off calmly by explaining that she “offered services, but not those kinds of services.”
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What do Germans talk about when they talk about antisemitism?
In today’s Germany, an accusation of antisemitism can end careers, shutter institutions and put political alliances beyond consideration. That gravity is understandable in the country responsible for the Holocaust. What has become less clear, particularly since the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing war in Gaza, is what Germans mean when they use the word “antisemitism.”
Days before Berliners went to the polls on Sept. 20, Germany’s chancellor Friedrich Merz provided a particularly awkward illustration. At a campaign event for his party, the CDU, Merz called antisemitism “the most perfidious form of xenophobia.” German Jews were quick to point out a glaring problem; they were not foreigners. The contentious IHRA framework officially embraced by Germany stresses that antisemitism and hostility toward foreigners are separate phenomena.
The confusion has become politically consequential since Berlin voted. Die Linke, a democratic socialist party, won 25.7%, more than doubling its 2023 share and finishing nearly seven points ahead of the CDU, which came in at 18.8%. The far-right AfD came third with 16.3%, itself an extraordinary gain of 7.2 points. Yet, since the election, the question consuming German politics has been whether Die Linke is too antisemitic to govern.
Israel’s ambassador, Ron Prosor, described antisemitism within Die Linke as systemic. The Central Council of Jews warned the SPD and Greens against joining a Linke-led coalition. Bavaria’s premier, Markus Söder, called Die Linke “deeply antisemitic.”
Philipp Peyman Engel, editor in chief of the Jüdische Allgemeine, the weekly newspaper of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, distilled the case against Die Linke in Britain’s Jewish Chronicle. The party, he wrote, was “riddled with people who hate Jews and Israel” and represented “the elimination of Israel.” Even voters drawn by rents and social policy had tolerated its hatred of Israel; SPD and Green politicians would forfeit any claim to moral seriousness by governing with it. “No non-Jewish democrat should simply accept this election result either,” he wrote.
That is an extraordinary indictment of a party that just received more votes than any other in the German capital. It is also hard to reconcile with the party that actually exists.
Die Linke does carry unusual historical baggage. It was formed in 2007 from a movement of trade unionists and Social Democrats alienated by Gerhard Schröder’s welfare reforms and the PDS, successor to East Germany’s ruling communist party. The GDR pursued an anti-Zionist foreign policy, strands of which survived reunification; the modern party also absorbed a western anti-imperialist tradition in which hostility toward Israel has at times shaded into antisemitism.
A 2011 analysis published by Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education found serious hostility toward Israel in parts of Die Linke but rejected describing the party itself as antisemitic. A year later, Die Linke nominated Beate Klarsfeld — the Nazi hunter who spent decades pursuing German war criminals and famously slapped former Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger over his Nazi past — for the German presidency. She received 126 votes in the Federal Assembly.
Die Linke’s current official position is markedly different from Engel’s characterization in the Jewish Chronicle. At its federal congress in June, Die Linke explicitly affirmed Israeli and Palestinian self-determination and the right of both Israel and Palestine to exist. It passed a separate resolution condemning antisemitism and describing its sharp rise since Oct. 7. While one may regard those positions as inadequate, contradictory or politically naïve, they do not amount to a program for eliminating Israel.
The party that won Berlin last month has changed in other ways as well. Its candidate for mayor, Elif Eralp, a trained lawyer, was born in Munich to Turkish socialist trade unionists who fled the 1980 military coup. Her campaign centered on housing, rent controls and migrant rights, and borrowed consciously from Zohran Mamdani’s campaign in New York; Linke activists even traveled there to meet his advisers.
That helps explain why this election has rattled Germany’s political center. Die Linke is no longer easily dismissed as the residual party of eastern German communism. In Berlin, it has assembled a young, urban and increasingly diverse electorate around an issue — the cost of housing — that the governing parties have conspicuously failed to solve. Unlike the AfD, it also has potential coalition partners. A Linke-SPD-Green government could remove the CDU from power and seek to implement the result of a 2021 referendum, approved by 57.6% of voters, calling for the socialization of large housing companies.
There are nonetheless questions about parts of its Berlin organization, especially in Neukölln. A rapper at a campaign event sang “Yalla Yalla Intifada” and “Death to the IDF.” Ferat Koçak, the district’s Linke Bundestag member, was photographed on election night with Ibrahim Ibrahim, described by Democ, an anti-extremist monitoring group, as a longtime activist with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which the EU lists as a terrorist organization. Ibrahim has also been reported to have praised Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar as a “steadfast leader” and “martyr hero.”
Beyond Berlin, a June investigation by Bayerischer Rundfunk into internal forums and chats of Linksjugend, the party’s youth organization, found messages by a spokesman for Die Linke’s youth organization in Rhineland-Palatinate referring to Israeli “concentration camps” and a “genocide in the name of Judaism” and telling Israel to “drop dead!”
Wolfgang Benz, who directed the Center for Research on Antisemitism at Berlin’s Technical University for more than two decades and edited an eight-volume handbook on antisemitism, told the Tagesspiegel that the term Antisemitismus is undergoing an Ausverkauf — an inflationary depletion of its meaning.
“Die Linke is not antisemitic,” he said. Anti-Israel slogans can be crude, denunciatory, even “misanthropic,” without thereby becoming Jew-hatred. His answer when asked whether the chant “Death to the IDF” was antisemitic was no.
In the same interview, Benz also argued that Die Linke’s leadership should deal loudly and decisively with genuinely unacceptable conduct and singled out Bodo Ramelow, who became Linke’s first minister-president in 2014, and Petra Pau, a veteran Linke politician and former Bundestag vice president, as politicians with strong records against antisemitism. Benz’s successor, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, has likewise called the debate around Die Linke “overblown” and warned that antisemitism is being used to influence coalition formation.
The consequences of collapsing antisemitism and anti-Zionism have extended beyond electoral politics. In Verfassungsblog, an open-access forum on constitutional law and politics, scholars Dörthe Engelcke and Ilyas Saliba documented Palestinian-related events at German universities losing rooms or being canceled, while antisemitism commissioners intervened in debates over terms such as “genocide,” “apartheid” and “settler colonialism.” Berlin’s Jews, meanwhile, are hardly unanimous. An open letter signed by 150 Jewish Berliners, including Susan Neiman, Deborah Feldman and Eva Menasse, accused parts of the media and Jewish community of instrumentalizing antisemitism against Die Linke while the far right advances.
The signatories also point out some obvious facts that, I imagine, tend to get overlooked: that Jews in Berlin pay rent, send children to schools, use hospitals and, like their neighbors, worry about economic insecurity.
Britain’s Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn offers a cautionary precedent. As genuine failures over antisemitism became entangled with factional warfare, parts of Corbyn’s camp focused so heavily on the political motives behind the accusations that they appeared to minimize the underlying problem. The result was to strengthen the very attacks they regarded as politically motivated. Die Linke would be unwise to repeat that mistake.
Right now, far more than Die Linke’s reputation is on the line. The far-right AfD party won 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt last month, an increase of 23 percentage points. On the same day Berlin voted, it won 38.2% in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, according to preliminary official results, while the CDU fell to 4.9% and disappeared from the state parliament. In Berlin, the AfD rose from 9.1 to 16.3% and finished third.
Those results should provide some perspective on the attempt to establish whether Die Linke’s 25.7% represents an antisemitic rupture in German democracy. Die Linke’s leadership will have to demonstrate that its stated opposition to antisemitism has real-world consequences. But the claim that Jew-hatred is baked into the party itself is unsupported by its program, its history or the records of many of its leading politicians.
What the controversy more clearly reveals is the alarm produced when a party long treated as marginal suddenly wins and becomes capable of leading its government. Antisemitism, the most devastating accusation available in German political language, offers Die Linke’s opponents a means of turning questions about the behavior of certain activists into a referendum on the party’s legitimacy.
Yet while Berlin argues over whether Die Linke is fit to govern, a far-right party with openly ethnonationalist positions and powerful antidemocratic currents, is winning close to 40% in parts of the former East. What’s shocking is that Germany’s political center is devoting its fiercest moral language to the left precisely when the far right is remaking the country’s electoral map.
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Jewish federations are losing my generation — and future ones — over Israel and Netanyahu
When my father Norm Gordon was six years old, the Jewish Federation of Cleveland helped rescue him. Recent immigrants from Poland, his parents were already living precariously when his mother died and his father gave him up. The Jewish Children’s Bureau, funded by the JFC, found a home for him and his brothers and kept them all together under one roof. That’s the sort of thing Jewish federations across America were founded to do, going all the way back to the “Stuyvesant Promise” of 1655: pool the resources of Jewish communities to help the helpless. My first jobs were for JFC-funded camps. My mother, a social worker, spent her career working with agencies like Bellefair Jewish Children’s Bureau, funded by JFC. After my father Norm himself died young and my mother married my adoptive father James Ratner, our family’s ties to JFC grew even stronger. My father James was deeply involved with JFC for decades, serving on their Executive Committee and as Chair of their Overseas Connections Committee.
Now all those ties have been cut. My experience isn’t unique. Federations have been alienating constituents who don’t align ideologically with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s been happening all over the country. For three decades, I’d kept a portion of my assets with JFC in a donor-advised fund. I made gifts to my preferred charities out of the fund while the principal remained with JFC as part of the “community chest” they use to finance their operations. But JFC recently told me, in so many words, I should take my money elsewhere. So I did.
Their point of contention was that I wished to give some money from my donor-advised fund to Physicians for Human Rights. After the unprecedented and barbaric terror attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Jewish federations raised a lot of money for Israel. They also made lists of human rights organizations that were critical of the Israeli government. The JFC Donor-Advised Fund Committee notified me that this year, for the first time, my pledge to PHR would not be honored.
PHR is not the only cause I give to, but it’s vitally important to me. I’m an M.D., an editor of The American Psychoanalyst, and I’ve served on the PHR board for years. I am privileged to know their fine work in detail. Their physicians risk their lives in conflict zones and take on powerful autocratic regimes around the globe, using medical evidence to expose harms to civilians. In 1997, PHR shared the Nobel Peace Prize as a founding member of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Their work is especially important to me as I watch leadership in the U.S. subjugating science, reason, and the rule of law to executive power. PHR represents a commitment to precisely those threatened values that the majority of Jews hold dear, values that hadn’t previously conflicted with JFC’s. Very little of what PHR does relates to Israel at all. I saw no reason to choose between the two organizations until JFC asked me to.
Clearly, JFC’s Donor-Advised Fund Committee sees its decision as a laudable act — that they’re standing up to antisemitic bias even if doing so means losing a constituent and his capital. But that does not describe what happened here. The DAF Committee, on the contrary, rushed to judgment against PHR and alienated a longtime backer of JFC’s community chest with false claims of antisemitism, unsupported by evidence.
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In an email sent to some of my family members, who have also sadly withdrawn their support from JFC, JFC’s DAF Committee devoted just 130 words to its judgment against PHR. Echoing Netanyahu’s incendiary talking points about the medieval “blood libel,” the DAF Committee accused PHR of falsely blaming Israel for the destruction of Al-Ahli al-Arabi Hospital in Gaza City. Ironically, as NPR reported, PHR was a lone voice that did not rush to blame Israel before the facts were in: “By contrast, the advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights put out a call on the day of the blast for the protection of civilian life and for the incident to be the subject of an independent investigation. It notably did not project blame.”
The only piece of evidence the DAF Committee email provided for their claims was exactly that innocuous PHR press release that called on “all parties to abide by international law.” The JFC DAF Committee also claimed, without providing evidence, that PHR does not acknowledge or condemn Hamas’ use of tunnels to store weapons and shield warriors under hospitals. In a joint report on the devastating impact of the war in Gaza on Palestinian mothers and infants, PHR and the Global Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School do, on the contrary, explicitly call on Hamas not to militarize hospitals. The DAF Committee provided no evidence at all of PHR’s conflicts with the JFC mission.
Some may ask, “So what?” The JFC’s priority is defending Israel when it’s under attack. It’s not as though PHR is out there helping Israel. In fact, in highlighting the suffering of Palestinian civilians in their report instead of the victims of Oct. 7, and in documenting that the Israeli military has prevented medicine and baby formula from reaching Gaza without considering the larger reasons for Israel’s blockade, PHR shows clearly enough whose side they’re on. JFC is entitled to decline support to organizations that don’t support Israel and it doesn’t owe you a reason.
I don’t question JFC’s right. I question its wisdom. I’m not trying to persuade them to value PHR’s work the way I do, though I hope I’ve made a reasonable case for why I value it. I’m trying to say JFC is making a mistake in alienating constituents like me over a difference of opinion — alienating people who have long considered themselves allies, supported JFC for years, and care about Israel. There has to be room for rational disagreement in a community organization. If not, the federations will hemorrhage constituents and support and become politicized. The majority of American Jews are highly critical of the current Israeli government and its campaign in Gaza. Younger people even more so. JFC may disagree with the rest of us, but it’s not as though we’re making stuff up out of thin air. Israel’s own ex-generals are accusing West Bank settlers of “ethnic cleansing.”
By refusing to accommodate our views, do the federations hope to change our minds? Is this how the federations want to advertise themselves to the majority of American Jews who dare to question Netanyahu? Telling us there’s no room for us, and justifying their conclusions with sloppy assumptions, naive parroting of Netanyahu, and wanton disrespect for others’ views and expertise?
I have no sympathy for Hamas. Human rights organizations like PHR do not support Hamas. Most of the 2 million people living in Gaza, however, are not terrorists. They are human beings and half of them are children. Before Oct. 7, 2023, there were 30,000 Hamas fighters in Gaza, according to the Israeli Defense Forces, a tiny fraction of the Gaza population. I don’t see the harm in trying to insure mothers’ and infants’ access to medicine and baby formula. Nor in documenting the Israeli government’s violations of the rules of warfare when they deny medicine and baby formula to Palestinian mothers and infants who were not perpetrators of Oct. 7. Is our own government here in the U.S. always beyond reproach? No government is. Only authoritarian regimes consider themselves beyond reproach. Again, I don’t expect JFC’s DAF Committee to see it my way.
I would, however, ask them to consider the possible long-term consequences of purging people who think as I do. If protecting Palestinian mothers and infants is really such an affront to JFC’s mission, what does that say about its mission and its priorities? Quashing criticism of the Israeli government is a dramatic departure from JFC’s founding principles. The leaders of the social welfare agencies that depend on JFC’s support will be dismayed to learn that JFC worries more about defunding PHR reports on baby formula than they worry about maintaining the Bellefaire Jewish Children’s Bureau. JFC has been a national leader among the federations from the beginning in caring for their community’s most vulnerable, including children and the elderly. The founders of United Way emulated JFC when in 1913 they began organizing their own community chests. If JFC’s central aim is still the thing they were always best at — maintaining a community chest to help people, as they once helped my father and his brothers — then pushing me out for supporting PHR hardly seems like a good way to serve that aim.
What is most shocking to me is that the federations really don’t seem to care what the majority of American Jews think, or how many constituents they lose by purging those who refuse to equate criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism. Like Netanyahu, they seem quite comfortable without us. But they’re losing this generation and the next one.
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Israel’s supreme court says Arab parties can run in Oct. 27 election
(JTA) — TEL AVIV – Israel’s Supreme Court ruling upholding the right of Arab parties to run in the Oct. 27 election could make it more difficult for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to form a new coalition after the election.
In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the Joint Arab List and Ra’am, the two Arab-led political lists competing in Israel’s elections, could run. The ruling overturned a decision by the Central Elections Committee, a largely political body in which parties in Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition hold a majority of the seats, which had voted last month to bar the lists from running.
“The court found that the materials submitted to the Central Elections Committee did not meet the standards established in the case law for disqualifying a list of candidates,” the court said in its ruling, which did not include extensive reasoning.
The decision restored the parties that traditionally represent Israel’s more than 2 million Arab citizens and in doing so helped the opposition block. Now a wide constituency that rejects working with Netanyahu will have a reason to head to the polls rather than stay home.
Most polls have shown that the opposition bloc would need to include the parliamentary seats held by the Ra’am party, led by MK Mansour Abbas, in order to gain the lead over Netanyahu’s coalition. Unlike Ra’am, the Joint Arab List has never sat in an Israeli coalition and there is no expectation that it would join with Zionist Jewish-led parties to do so.
The court also took a number of other steps regarding the upcoming election. It overturned the committee’s decision to disqualify Ofer Cassif, a Jewish lawmaker running as part of the Joint List. In Cassif’s case, the decision was made by a 7-2 majority.
The Supreme Court justices said they “strongly condemn the outrageous statements and actions by Cassif that evoke revulsion.” At the same time, they ruled that “these statements or actions do not meet the stringent tests established” for disqualifying a candidate.
According to the petition seeking Cassif’s disqualification, he had legitimized Palestinian violence during the war, referred to those seeking to attack Israeli soldiers as “freedom fighters” and taken actions against Israel in international legal forums.
The most significant development, however, came in the case of Sami Abu Shehadeh, the leader of Balad, one of the parties that make up the Joint List.
During a Thursday hearing, the Supreme Court took the unusual step of indicating to Abu Shehadeh that a majority of the justices were inclined to disqualify him and recommended that he withdraw his candidacy.
Following internal consultations, Balad announced that Abu Shehadeh would withdraw his candidacy, rendering the court’s expected ruling on his disqualification moot.
“Sami Abu Shehadeh did not retract his positions and did not flee the struggle. Only after the court itself announced its intention to uphold the disqualification did he decide to withdraw his candidacy,” Balad said in an official statement.
A central part of the case against Abu Shehadeh focused on an article he published on Oct. 8, 2023, one day after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, in which the terror organization killed 1,200 people in Israel and took another 251 hostage.
In the article, Abu Shehadeh described the Oct. 7 events as an “important historic event” and suggested that lessons could be learned from how Hamas had managed to surprise Israel and carry out its invasion. His comments were cited as evidence that he supports armed struggle against Israel, one of the grounds on which candidates can be disqualified under Israeli law.
In its ruling, the Supreme Court said there was “a consensus that the things said by Mr. Abu Shehadeh are painful, outrageous and revolting.” The decision to disqualify Abu Shehadeh was also supported by the Democrats, Israel’s most left-wing Zionist party.
During the Supreme Court hearing, Abu Shehadeh acknowledged that “this paragraph was not written correctly.” He said, “I have never supported violence in my life,” and said that he knows victims of the Oct. 7 attack.
Balad said Abu Shehadeh would continue to lead the party’s political activities even without serving in the Knesset.
The Joint List sharply criticized the court’s handling of the case. In a statement, the list said that “the heart of the matter” was “preventing an Arab political leader from running in the elections and infringing on our public’s right to choose its representatives.”
The list accused the court of acting “following a campaign of incitement and political persecution led by the fascist and Kahanist right, joined by the leaders of the Zionist opposition parties.”
“The court must bear responsibility for its disgraceful decision before our public and before public opinion in Israel and around the world, for providing judicial cover for political exclusion. This ruling is another link in the chain of persecution of our public.”
Right-wing Israeli politicians also criticized the court for declining to issue a ruling formally disqualifying Abu Shehadeh rather than merely pressing him to withdraw.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist member of Netanyahu’s government, called the court’s proposal “too merciful” and said it “harms the democracy of the State of Israel.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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