The vote to oust MK Cassif for supporting ICJ petition against Israel is political persecution

MK Ofer Cassif of Hadash, at the Knesset, January 2024

The lead editorial in Haaretz on 3o January 2024:

The Knesset and the state hit a new nadir with the House Committee’s decision to oust MK Ofer Cassif (Hadash-Ta’al) because of his support for South Africa’s petition against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

In that petition, South Africa claimed Israel was guilty of genocide in the Gaza Strip. The Basic Law on the Knesset allows the full Knesset to oust an MK either for racism or for supporting armed struggle against Israel. But nothing Cassif has said meets this definition.

The committee’s decision to oust Cassif emits a stench of political persecution. Had the Knesset truly been determined to oust the racists within it, there wouldn’t have been enough MKs to form the current government of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.

MK Oded Forer (Yisrael Beiteinu), who spearheaded the drive to oust Cassif, showed off the twisted logic that guided him. “You can view the petition to The Hague as if it had been submitted by Cassif himself,” he said. “And if it had been granted, it would have undermined Israel’s security.” Why? Because Cassif’s goal was “to stop the fighting,” Forer continued, and then “Hamas would recover,” which would result in “harm to our soldiers.”

Of the Knesset’s 120 members, 85 signed the request to oust Cassif – all MKs except those belonging to Labor and the Arab parties. And on Tuesday, 14 of the House Committee’s 16 members voted to oust him.

The enlightened souls who want to get rid of Cassif include Moshe Saada (Likud), who not long ago said, “it’s clear to everyone that we have to destroy Gaza,” and Tzvika Foghel (Otzma Yehudit), who said a month ago that “first we’ll defeat Hamas and Hezbollah, and to top it off, we’ll impose order in the Supreme Court.” But even Matan Kahana and Zeev Elkin of the centrist National Unity Party and Naor Shiri of the opposition Yesh Atid party supported the ouster.

Cassif has every right to think that Israel is committing war crimes. Indeed, the world’s top lawyers agreed to discuss this very issue in The Hague. But the ouster law was enacted from the start to get rid of the Knesset’s Arab representatives, who seek to make Israel a full democracy and identify with the Palestinians’ struggle to free themselves of the occupation. These MKs don’t support terror, and they certainly don’t support Hamas’ attack on October 7, as Cassif once again reiterated.

It’s a bit ironic that the Knesset found someone who it thinks deserves to be ousted just a few days after Israel was handed an international order to punish the inciters and racists who led it to The Hague, and two days after a conference in Jerusalem’s International Convention Center at which ministers and MKs advocated the transfer of all 2.3 million Gazans.

The committee’s approval of the ouster isn’t the end of the road. There are two more stops along the way – first, approval by the full Knesset (where 90 of the 120 MKs must support it), and then the Supreme Court, if Cassif decides to appeal the decision. There, the justices will presumably clean up the Knesset’s mess, as they usually do, and overturn the decision. But the stain on Israeli democracy won’t easily be erased.

This article is reproduced in its entirety