Court to review Likud election c'tee's decision to demote Feiglin at behest of Ratzon and Yatom.
By GIL STERN STERN HOFFMANMoshe Feiglin 248.88(photo credit: Ariel Jerozlimski)
Tel Aviv District Court deputy president Yehud Zaft will hold a hearing on Tuesday on the Likud election committee's decision to demote activist Moshe Feiglin and former MKs Michael Ratzon and Ehud Yatom to lower places on the party's list.
The hearing will take place at the request of Ratzon, who appealed the decision to the external court. Feiglin chose not to appeal himself, but would return to the 20th slot on the list if Ratzon's appeal was successful.
"The results of the race were published and then they were changed in an undemocratic maneuver in order to push Feiglin out of the Knesset," Ratzon wrote in the appeal.
Ratzon's lawyer, Ilan Bombach, told The Jerusalem Post that his client was "an innocent bystander" who had been injured in the party leaders' attempt to demote Feiglin. Ratzon came in 20th in the Likud primaries and was shunted to 24th place as a result of the first reserved slots on the Likud list. However, after the Likud decided to cancel the slots reserved for women due to four women already having been chosen among the top 20 candidates, an entire block of reserved slots was advanced, pushing back Feiglin, Ratzon and former MK Ehud Yatom. The three appealed to a Likud tribunal against the shift, but the appeal was rejected early Friday morning. Ratzon ended up in the 37th spot.
"The decision distorted the will of the voters," said Bombach.
Meanwhile, another appeal was issued to the same court on Sunday by Ethiopian-born candidate Aleli Adamsu, who was replaced on the Likud list last week by Russian-born businessman Vladimir Shklar after the election committee decided that Adamsu had lived in Israel for too long to run for a slot reserved for a new immigrant.
Dozens of Adamsu's Ethiopian supporters demonstrated outside the Likud's Tel Aviv headquarters on Sunday. The protesters held signs reading "No entrance to Ethiopians" and "The Blacks are Getting Screwed Again."
A Likud spokesman responded to the protest by saying that the emotions of the demonstrators were understandable, but the committee's decision to replace Adamsu with Shklar had been made based purely on legal grounds.
Meanwhile in Kadima, MKs Yohanan Plesner, Shai Hermesh and Yisrael Hasson as well as candidate Arye Bibi appealed to their party's internal court, asking it to demote Rachel Adato from the 22nd slot she had been given in Wednesday's primary, which was reserved for women. They wrote in the appeal that the reserved slot had been canceled when four women were elected to the top 10 places on the list.
"I don't want to fire inside my own tank, but there were enough women elected and no need for a reserved slot," Plesner said.
Druse candidate Akram Hason asked Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz on Sunday to investigate the primary for forgeries in the Druse sector that allowed deputy Foreign Minister Majallie Whbee to defeat him in the race for the 21st slot on the list, reserved for a non-Jew. As evidence, he cited statistics showing that voters in the Druse sector had taken less than half the time to vote as Jews did, and that the turnout in the Druse sector had increased dramatically at 11 p.m.
Channel 1 reported on Sunday night that in the town of Kisra, between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m., 128 people voted at the rate of 56 seconds per vote.
Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit, who initiated the computerized voting, rejected Hason's charges.
"These claims are baseless," Sheetrit said. "The voting was flawless."
Dan Izenberg contributed to this report.
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