Summary
Yeredor v. Central Elections Commission (October 1965), in Lahav’s account (Chapter 11): the Supreme Court’s decision sustaining the ban on Al-Ard’s Arab Socialist Party list in the 1965 elections, in which Chief Justice Simon Agranat held that the continuity and immortality of the state of Israel is a “fundamental constitutional premise” no state organ may ignore (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 2102-2271).
Details
- The Central Elections Committee (chaired by Justice Landau) banned the list as the outlawed Al-Ard in another garb; it was the first time in Israel’s history a party was forbidden to participate in an election, and Agranat read the case as a test of his new leadership of a co-equal branch (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 2102-2200).
- Agranat (Sussman concurring) conceded the committee’s powers were in general merely ministerial and the statute said nothing about banning compliant parties, but held the case unique: the Declaration of Independence’s “natural and historic right of the Jewish people to live like any nation” made the state’s continuity a constitutional premise, so the committee “had no option but to ban Al-Ard” (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 2160-2205).
- Haim Cohn dissented: the Elections Law authorised no substantive ban, and the rule of law required explicit statutory power; the committee had no proof of destructive intent except the 1964 holding and the executive declaration of illegality (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 2146-2205).
- Agranat justified suppressing the party by democracy’s self-defense: Witkon’s Weimar passage, Ernst Barker’s cold-war “party owing a foreign allegiance”, and Lincoln’s Civil War address to Congress (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 2206-2271).
- Lahav’s reading: the case subordinated political and civil liberties to the state’s declared Jewishness for the first time, rested the destructive-intent finding on the military’s decoding of Al-Ard’s constitution, and departed from Agranat’s own Kol ha-Am probable-danger doctrine and his 1960 Qardosh liberalism (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 2102-2271).
Where sources disagree
Lahav records Al-Ard’s own gloss on its constitution — that Palestinian Arabs wished to live in dignity side by side with the Jews and that Israel, though not explicitly recognised, was implicitly acknowledged as a given — against the military authorities’ decoding, adopted by the Court, under which the same text rejected partition and Israel’s existence (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 2160-2205).
Related pages
Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, Al-Ard, Qardosh Case, Simon Agranat, Haim Cohn, Kol Ha’am Case