Since 2016, Basic Law: The Knesset has allowed 90 of the parliament’s 120 members to remove a sitting member for supporting armed struggle against Israel or inciting racism, and the Knesset’s own record shows no member has been unseated under it. The same statute’s section 7A allows the Central Elections Committee to bar candidate lists on related grounds, and the Supreme Court, sitting as the Elections Appeals Court, reversed the committee’s decisions against Arab candidate lists in 2019 and again in 2021. On 18 July 2024 the Knesset adopted a resolution rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River, 68 votes to 9. Palestinians’ own assessment of their representatives is a separate measurement: 87% told the Washington Institute’s 2023 survey that the Palestinian Authority is corrupt.
Key Findings
- Basic Law: The Knesset, as amended in 2016, sets the bar for removing a sitting member at 90 of 120 votes, on the grounds of incitement to racism or support for armed struggle against Israel (Knesset, enacted text).
- Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People was adopted in 2018 by 62 votes to 55; its clause 1(c) states that the realization of national self-determination in the State of Israel “is exclusive to the Jewish People” (Knesset, enacted text, unofficial English translation).
- The Knesset resolution of 18 July 2024 rejecting a Palestinian state west of the Jordan passed 68 to 9, with 77 of 120 members recording a position (Knesset, recorded vote).
- Ra’am, the United Arab List, held 4 seats in the coalition that formed Israel’s 36th Government in June 2021, the first Arab party to sign coalition agreements and sit in an Israeli government (Knesset, official record).
- 87% of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza said the Palestinian Authority is corrupt and 78% wanted Mahmoud Abbas to resign (Washington Institute, 2023 survey); 19% reported satisfaction with Abbas’s performance (March 2023 Palestinian polling, relayed by Oppenheim for Carnegie Endowment, 2023).
What does the enacted record show about restricting Palestinian representatives?
Section 7A of Basic Law: The Knesset bars a candidate list or an individual candidate whose objects or actions include negation of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, incitement to racism, or support for armed struggle by a hostile state or a terrorist organization against Israel. In 2016 the Knesset added Amendment 44, permitting 90 of the 120 members to terminate a sitting member’s tenure on two of those grounds.
The threshold is the measurable part of that instrument. Removal requires three quarters of the whole house, a majority larger than any single governing coalition has held in the period, and the Knesset record shows no member has been unseated under the amendment since its enactment.
The third enacted text bearing on representation is Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, adopted in 2018 by 62 votes to 55. Its clause 1(b) states that “The State of Israel is the nation state of the Jewish People in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination,” and clause 1(c) that “The realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People.” Clause 4 makes Hebrew “the language of the State” and gives Arabic “a special status,” while providing that nothing in the article compromises the status Arabic held in practice before the law came into force. The Nation-State Law contains no equality clause and no individual-rights clause, a fact about the text rather than a finding about administration. The Knesset labels its English translation unofficial.
Is it often said that leading politicians consistently delegitimize Palestinian representatives?
It is often said that leading Israeli politicians consistently undermine the legitimacy of Palestinian political representatives. B’Tselem published that formulation in its January 2021 position paper on Israeli rule between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, and Amnesty International’s February 2022 report on Israel and the Palestinians describes inflammatory and stigmatizing language directed at Palestinian members of the Knesset. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counted 2.130 million Arab residents in September 2025.
That figure represented 21.0% of the country’s 10.148 million total, according to the same Central Bureau of Statistics count.
Both statements are those organizations’ own characterizations, on their own definitions, and both are dated. Neither publishes a rate: no count of statements, no denominator of politicians, no measured series over time. What each describes is a pattern of rhetoric and of proposed rules, and the report of a pattern is a different quantity from a measured share.
The base rate the claim does not report is the seated one. Arab parties have contested every recent Knesset election, held seats in every one of them, and one of them sat in a governing coalition in 2021. The population share above is the comparison the claim invites and does not supply.
Two things therefore travel together in the record. Proposals and rhetoric aimed at Palestinian representatives are documented, dated and quotable, including by the two organizations named above. Enacted restriction on seated representation is a narrower record: a 90-vote removal power never exercised, and disqualification decisions that were taken and then reversed on appeal, which the next section reads directly from the court file.
Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics publishes the population counts and the shares on different bases, and the two named groups in its September 2025 release, 7.758 million Jews and others and 2.130 million Arabs, sum to 9.888 million rather than to the 10.148 million total, with roughly 260,000 foreign residents counted in the total outside both groups. The 21.0% above is stated against the full total.
Have Israeli courts allowed Arab parties to be barred from elections?
The Israeli Supreme Court, sitting as the Elections Appeals Court under section 7A, reversed the Central Elections Committee’s disqualification decisions against Arab candidate lists ahead of both the 2019 and the 2021 elections, so those lists appeared on the ballot. The committee is a political body composed of party representatives; the court is the final instance, and in this period it did not let a disqualification of an Arab list stand.
The same statute has been applied in the other direction. In its 2019 election-appeal rulings the court let stand the committee’s disqualification of a far-right Jewish candidate on the incitement-to-racism ground in section 7A, which is the clause’s second limb. Read from the court record rather than from the committee’s votes, the instrument is not confined to one side of the house.
The companion ruling is HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, decided 8 July 2021, in which an eleven-justice panel dismissed fifteen petitions against the Nation-State Law and upheld it. The court held that the Knesset as constituent authority is “not all powerful” and has no authority, even by Basic Law, to deny or facially contradict the core character of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. It set the test narrowly: whether an amendment denies the core democratic identity of the state or inflicts mortal harm on the minimal core characteristics of its identity as a Jewish and democratic state, a limit the court derived from the Declaration of Independence, the Basic Laws, Knesset legislation and its own case law.
The ruling runs both ways and is cited both ways. The law stands, and the court simultaneously declared a constitutional ceiling that a future Basic Law could breach. A report that carries one half without the other has carried half the judgment.
Has a Palestinian party ever joined an Israeli governing coalition?
Yes: Ra’am, the United Arab List, held 4 of the 120 Knesset seats in the coalition that formed Israel’s 36th Government in June 2021, signing coalition agreements and taking part in the government’s parliamentary majority. The Knesset’s own composition record is the source, and it is the first instance in which an Arab party sat inside an Israeli governing coalition rather than in opposition or in tacit support from outside.
The coalition’s arithmetic makes the seat count load-bearing. A government formed on the narrowest possible margin depended on those 4 votes for its existence, which places an Arab party’s seats inside the operative majority rather than adjacent to it.
The instance sits in the same record as the enacted restrictions above, and neither cancels the other. The 90-vote removal power and the section 7A disqualification route were on the books throughout the 36th Government’s term, and a party subject to that framework held seats in the coalition that governed under it. Both facts are in the Knesset record, both are dated, and any answer to the question that reports one and omits the other has reported a selection.
Reading the two together also separates two quantities the question tends to fuse. Rhetorical delegitimization is measured, when it is measured at all, in language. Institutional standing is measured in seats, coalition agreements and votes, and on that measure the record contains one documented case of an Arab party inside a government and no case of a member removed under Amendment 44.
How has the Knesset voted on Palestinian statehood and the PLO?
On 18 July 2024 the Knesset adopted a resolution rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River by 68 votes to 9.
That is 77 of 120 members recording a position, with 43 not voting, so the margin runs on a little under two thirds of the chamber.
That is the institutional act at the level of Palestinian national representation, and it is a recorded vote rather than an attributed statement.
The denominator matters to reading it. 68 is a majority of the whole house and 9 is the recorded opposition, so the margin among those voting was near nine to one, while a third of the chamber recorded nothing at all. The resolution is a declaration of the Knesset’s position and does not itself amend any Basic Law.
The official record also holds the recognition it sits against. In the exchange of letters of 9 September 1993, Yasser Arafat wrote on behalf of the Palestine Liberation Organization that the PLO recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin wrote that the Government of Israel has decided to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and to commence negotiations with it. That recognition of a representative body was never withdrawn by a superseding instrument of the same kind, and Israel’s cabinet decisions on relations with the Palestinian Authority have since been published as separate, dated government decisions.
The record therefore holds a 1993 executive recognition of the PLO as the Palestinians’ representative and a 2024 parliamentary resolution against Palestinian statehood, at different levels of the state and thirty-one years apart. Where the incentive structure around a two-state outcome is at issue, the 68 to 9 vote is the countable datum, and it counts votes, not intentions.
When did Palestinians last vote for their own representatives?
Palestinians last elected a legislature in January 2006 and last elected a president in January 2005, per the Palestinian Central Elections Commission’s published results. On 29 April 2021 a Palestinian presidential decree postponed the legislative and presidential elections scheduled for that year, and no replacement date has since been set in the official record.
In the January 2006 legislative election the Change and Reform list associated with Hamas took 74 of the 132 seats. The Palestinian Legislative Council did not function as a sitting legislature for most of the period that followed, and the mandate of the presidency has run since the January 2005 vote without a further election.
The population governed under those mandates is measured by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, which counted 4,780,978 residents of the West Bank and Gaza in its 2017 census, 2,881,687 in the West Bank and 1,899,291 in Gaza, the third and most recent full enumeration the authority has conducted. Every later total in the international series is a projection off that measured base rather than a count.
This is the part of the question that no external characterization supplies and the Palestinian side’s own official record answers directly. Two decades separate the last national vote from the present, and the electorate now includes a cohort born after it. Whatever pressure Israeli statutes, votes or statements place on Palestinian representation, the interval since the last mandate was conferred is a fact of the Palestinian record, dated by a Palestinian decree and countable in years.
How do Palestinians themselves rate their own representatives?
87% of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza said the Palestinian Authority is corrupt, on the Washington Institute’s 2023 survey, and 78% of respondents wanted Mahmoud Abbas to resign. These are published survey shares reporting attitudes among Palestinians, not measurements of any effect of Israeli conduct.
The same 2023 Washington Institute survey reported that 62% considered the Palestinian Authority a liability. Beth Oppenheim, in an April 2023 Carnegie Europe analysis, relayed from Palestinian opinion polling of March 2023 that 19% reported satisfaction with Abbas’s performance and 52% of Palestinians saying that the dissolution or collapse of the Palestinian Authority would serve the interest of the Palestinian people. Each figure is that body’s own published reading, and the two bodies fielded separate instruments, so the shares describe adjacent questions rather than one series.
Oppenheim’s 2023 analysis also argues that the Palestinian Authority’s security coordination with Israel has harmed the authority’s legitimacy, which is one author’s assessment of a relationship rather than a measured share, and it is reported here as such. The survey figures above are attitudes reported by respondents; the attribution of those attitudes to any single cause is not carried by the instruments that produced them.
Separating the two quantities is what the question requires. Legitimacy as an attitude held among Palestinians about their own institutions is measured, by named bodies, in published percentages. Legitimacy as something acted upon by Israeli officials is recorded in statutes, votes and rulings. The first set of numbers does not measure the second, and neither substitutes for it.
Is delegitimization documented in one direction only?
The peer-reviewed literature models delegitimization as reciprocal rather than one-directional: Oren and Bar-Tal (2007, peer-reviewed) analyze the Israeli-Palestinian case as one in which each society’s delegitimizing beliefs about the other are sustained by the conflict and in turn sustain it, and they treat the dynamic as mutual by construction. The primary texts on recognition span 1968 to 2017 and carry the same reciprocity.
The 1968 Palestinian National Charter declares the 1947 partition of Palestine and the establishment of Israel null and void. Hamas’s 1988 covenant rejected recognition of Israel outright; its 2017 Document of General Principles and Policies accepted a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines while declining to recognize Israel. Against those texts sits the 1993 exchange of letters cited above, in which the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist in peace and security and Israel recognized the PLO as the Palestinians’ representative. The instruments are dated and quotable, and they point in more than one direction.
The literature also records delegitimization operating inside each society rather than only across the divide. The Institute for National Security Studies published “Public Legitimacy as a Necessary Condition for a Peace Process,” a 2018 study testing the third Netanyahu government against that condition, and a Strategic Assessment article, “The Delegitimization of Peace Advocates in Israeli Society,” on the treatment of peace advocates within Israel. Both are research-institute publications rather than peer-reviewed journal articles, and both describe an intra-societal contest over which actors may legitimately speak.
Read together, the record does not support a single-vector account in either direction. It documents statutes and votes on one side, founding charters on the other, one mutual recognition in 1993, and an internal argument in both societies about who counts as a legitimate interlocutor.
Where does representative delegitimization language sit in measured antisemitic discourse?
7.7% of the antisemitic comments coded in the United Kingdom sample invoked denial of Jewish self-determination, per Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022, peer-reviewed), who coded 4,500 comments on the Facebook pages of leading British, French and German media outlets reacting to the May 2021 escalation against an IHRA-based scheme.
The same study found 26.9% of 1,504 analyzed UK comments antisemitic, against 12.6% of 1,500 French comments and 13.6% of 1,520 German comments. Within the UK antisemitic comments, the “evil” stereotype appeared in 39.8%, Israel’s sole guilt in 27.9%, child murder or blood libel in 8.1%, the apartheid analogy in 5.2% and the Nazi analogy in 4.2%. Thread context was required to infer the antisemitic meaning in 38.7% of UK antisemitic comments.
Two further peer-reviewed measurements sit alongside it, in correlational terms and with their authors’ caveats. Harber, Bulska, Malloy and Vila (2026, peer-reviewed) report that their Conspiracies Mediated Model accounted for over 55% of the variance in anti-Israel attitudes across three preregistered studies, with conspiracy beliefs implicating Israel and Zionists mediating the association between antisemitism and anti-Israel attitudes, while conspiracy beliefs about Jews unrelated to Israel did not. Ozer, Obaidi and Bergh (2025, peer-reviewed), in two British experiments of 354 and 490 participants, found political orientation associated with anti-Jewish hostility through social dominance orientation on one pathway and, separately, conservative orientation negatively associated with antisemitism through out-group identity fusion with the Palestinian people.
These are associations measured in survey and comment corpora, not claims about the politicians, statutes or votes recorded earlier in this report.
Methodology
This report reads four kinds of record and keeps them apart.
Enacted texts and recorded votes come from the Knesset: Basic Law: The Knesset including its 2016 Amendment 44, Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People and its 62 to 55 adoption vote, the resolution of 18 July 2024 and its 68 to 9 vote, and the composition record of the 36th Government. The Knesset labels its English translation of the Nation-State Law unofficial, and clause wording is quoted from that translation.
Court records are the judgments themselves: HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, decided 8 July 2021 by an eleven-justice panel, and the Supreme Court’s election-appeal rulings under section 7A in 2019 and 2021. The panel’s vote split in Hasson is not stated here. These are Israeli domestic court records adjudicating Israeli statutes.
Official statistics come from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (September 2025 population release) and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (2017 census). The Bureau’s published percentages and its total rest on different bases, which is why the 21.0% here is computed against the full 10.148 million total and stated as such. Palestinian electoral dates come from the Palestinian Central Elections Commission’s published results and the presidential decree of 29 April 2021.
Survey shares are cited as their publishing bodies report them: the Washington Institute’s 2023 survey and the Carnegie Endowment’s 2023 analysis. Those bodies fielded separate instruments, so their figures are adjacent readings and not one series, and neither instrument attributes the attitudes it measures to a cause. Peer-reviewed measurements of discourse (Becker, Ascone and Troschke, 2022; Ozer, Obaidi and Bergh, 2025; Harber and colleagues, 2026; Oren and Bar-Tal, 2007) are carried correlationally, with their samples and windows stated. The Institute for National Security Studies items are research-institute publications, not peer-reviewed articles.
Two limits bound the answer. No body publishes a rate of delegitimization: there is no count of statements over a denominator of officials, so the phenomenon named in the question is documented in dated statements, statutes and votes rather than in a measured series. Where a monitoring organization’s characterization is the claim under examination, it is named and dated as that organization’s own statement on its own definitions, and the report’s figures are drawn from the enacted, judicial, statistical and peer-reviewed records above. The subject measured throughout is the record, not the intent behind any act in it.
Conclusion
So does the record show Israeli politicians undermining the legitimacy of Palestinian representatives? On what can be counted, the answer splits by what is being represented. At the level of Palestinian national representation, the Knesset voted 68 to 9 against a Palestinian state west of the Jordan in July 2024, thirty-one years after Israel’s government recognized the PLO as the Palestinians’ representative in the 1993 letters, and both instruments sit in the official file. At the level of Palestinian citizens inside Israel, the statutory power exists and has not been used: 90 of 120 votes can unseat a member, no member has been unseated, the Central Elections Committee’s moves against Arab lists were reversed at final instance in 2019 and 2021, and Ra’am’s 4 seats were inside the coalition that governed in 2021. The Nation-State Law’s clause 1(c) reserves national self-determination in Israel exclusively to the Jewish People, and Israel’s own highest court upheld it while declaring a constitutional ceiling it could have breached.
Alongside that, the legitimacy Palestinians themselves confer is measured separately and it is low: 87% called the Palestinian Authority corrupt and 78% wanted Abbas to resign on the Washington Institute’s 2023 reading, 19% reported satisfaction with his performance and 52% said the authority’s collapse would serve Palestinian interests on Carnegie’s, and the last national mandate any Palestinian representative received was conferred in the elections of 2005 and 2006, with the 2021 vote cancelled by decree. Delegitimization in this conflict is also documented running in more than one direction and inside both societies, from the 1968 charter and the 1988 covenant to the treatment of peace advocates within Israel.
The measured discourse is where the two threads meet. Becker, Ascone and Troschke found denial of Jewish self-determination in 7.7% of coded antisemitic UK comments after the May 2021 escalation, a share small beside the 39.8% carrying the “evil” stereotype, and Harber and colleagues found conspiracy beliefs about Israel and Zionists mediating the link between antisemitism and anti-Israel attitudes. Arguments about who may legitimately speak for a people therefore travel in both registers at once: as clauses and votes in a parliament, and as vocabulary in comment threads that already carries an older cargo. When a public argument reduces to which side’s representatives count as real, what does that argument put into circulation next?
Frequently Asked Questions
Which Israeli law lets the Knesset remove a sitting member?
Basic Law: The Knesset, as amended in 2016 by Amendment 44, permits 90 of the 120 members to terminate the tenure of a sitting member who incited racism or supported armed struggle against Israel. The threshold is three quarters of the whole house, and the Knesset record shows no removal carried out under it.
Which body decides whether a candidate list can run in Israel?
The Central Elections Committee, a body composed of party representatives, votes on disqualification under section 7A, and the Supreme Court sitting as the Elections Appeals Court decides the appeal. The court is the final instance, which is why a committee vote against a list and the list’s exclusion from the ballot are two different facts.
Does section 7A apply only to Arab candidates?
No. Its grounds include incitement to racism, and the Supreme Court’s 2019 election-appeal rulings let stand the disqualification of a far-right Jewish candidate on that ground while reversing the committee’s decisions against Arab lists in the same cycle.
Who does Israel officially recognize as representing the Palestinians?
In the exchange of letters of 9 September 1993, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin wrote that the Government of Israel had decided to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people, and Yasser Arafat wrote that the PLO recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security. Later Israeli cabinet decisions on relations with the Palestinian Authority are published separately and dated.
Why does the Palestinian population figure change depending on the source?
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics counted 4,780,978 residents of the West Bank and Gaza in its 2017 census, and that is the most recent full enumeration. Every later total in the World Bank and UN series is a projection off that base rather than a count, so figures diverge by vintage and by method.
Do the surveys of Palestinian opinion measure the effect of Israeli statements?
They do not. The Washington Institute’s 2023 shares and the Carnegie Endowment’s 2023 figures record attitudes reported by respondents at one point in time, and neither instrument attributes those attitudes to a cause, so they cannot be read as measuring how Israeli conduct moved Palestinian opinion.
What does “denial of self-determination” mean in antisemitism coding?
In the IHRA-based scheme Becker, Ascone and Troschke applied in 2022, it marks a comment denying the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, and it appeared in 7.7% of the antisemitic UK comments they coded. It is one category among several in that scheme, and the categories are not exclusive.
Sources
- Becker, Ascone and Troschke, 2022. Antisemitic Comments on Facebook Pages of Leading British, French, and German Media Outlets. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. DOI 10.1057/s41599-022-01337-8. Peer-reviewed.
- Oppenheim, Beth, 2023. Israel-Palestine’s Democracy and Security Crisis: How Should the EU Respond? Carnegie Europe, 5 April 2023, under the European Democracy Hub. carnegieendowment.org. Unrefereed think-tank policy article; the author is director of international relations at Gisha, an Israeli human rights organisation, and Carnegie disclaims institutional ownership. Every figure in it is relayed from another body.
- Government of Israel and Palestine Liberation Organization, 1993. Exchange of Letters between Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Chairman Yasser Arafat, 9 September 1993. Official record.
- Hamas, 1988. The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement; and Hamas, 2017. Document of General Principles and Policies. Primary political texts.
- Harber, Bulska, Malloy and Vila, 2026. Antisemitism, Conspiracy Beliefs, and Anti-Israel Attitudes. American Psychologist. DOI 10.1037/amp0001635. Peer-reviewed.
- Institute for National Security Studies, 2018. Public Legitimacy as a Necessary Condition for a Peace Process: A Test of the Third Netanyahu Government. inss.org.il. Research institute publication.
- Institute for National Security Studies, n.d. The Delegitimization of Peace Advocates in Israeli Society. Strategic Assessment. inss.org.il. Research institute publication.
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. Population of Israel on the Eve of Rosh Hashana 5786. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Israeli Supreme Court, 2019 and 2021. Election appeal rulings on Central Elections Committee disqualification decisions under section 7A of Basic Law: The Knesset. Official court record.
- Israeli Supreme Court, 2021. HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, judgment of 8 July 2021. Official court record.
- Knesset, 1958 and subsequent amendments, including Amendment 44 (2016). Basic Law: The Knesset, section 7A and the provision on termination of tenure. Enacted text, official record.
- Knesset, 2018. Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, official (unofficial English translation), adopted 62 to 55. main.knesset.gov.il. Enacted text, official record.
- Knesset, 2021. Composition and coalition record of the 36th Government of Israel. main.knesset.gov.il. Official record.
- Knesset, 2024. Resolution rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River, adopted 18 July 2024, 68 to 9. Recorded vote, official record.
- Oren and Bar-Tal, 2007. The Detrimental Dynamics of Delegitimization in Intractable Conflicts: The Israeli-Palestinian Case. International Journal of Intercultural Relations. Peer-reviewed.
- Ozer, Obaidi and Bergh, 2025. The Impact of Globalized Conflicts: Examining Attitudes Toward Jews Among Britons in the Political Context of the War in Gaza. International Journal of Intercultural Relations. DOI 10.1016/j.ijintrel.2025.102184. Peer-reviewed.
- Palestine Liberation Organization, 1968. The Palestinian National Charter. Primary political text.
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2018. Population, Housing and Establishments Census 2017 (final results). pcbs.gov.ps. Official record.
- Palestinian Central Elections Commission, 2005 and 2006. Published results of the presidential election of January 2005 and the legislative election of January 2006; and the Palestinian presidential decree of 29 April 2021 postponing the scheduled elections. Official records.
- Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2023. How the Palestinian Authority Failed Its People. washingtoninstitute.org. Published survey findings.