Israel’s Central Elections Committee voted Wednesday to disqualify the Joint List, a coalition of Arab political parties that largely opposes Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. They also voted to disqualify Ra’am, a historically Islamist party that has tried to moderate its image and participated in the governing coalition from 2021 to 2022.

• Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party applied to disqualify the group under a provision in Israel’s Basic Law that bans political parties that reject Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state or that support armed struggle against Israel.

• Israel holds its next general elections on October 27.

Israel’s Supreme Court will probably overturn the election committee’s decision. The Knesset’s opposition parties and Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara also indicated they opposed it.

• The one disqualification with broad support among the Israeli government, the opposition, the attorney general and even the Supreme Court is the disqualification of Sami Abu Shehadeh, the leader of the Joint List’s Balad party.

• Shahadeh published an article on Oct. 8, 2023, that appeared to support Hamas’s brutal massacre of 1,200 men, women and children. He said the attack was an “important historic event” that could show Arab resistance how to successfully beat Israel.

Zechariah 14:1-2 is a prophecy of the Palestinian Arabs getting organized and aggressive enough to capture East Jerusalem by force. Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry explains this in Chapter 3 of his free booklet Jerusalem in Prophecy. The banning dispute reminds the world how deeply divided Israel is and how bloodthirsty its enemies are, without and within.