Hadash candidate Jafar Farah quits Knesset slate over harassment claims

Jafar Farah, a candidate on the slate of the Israeli party Hadash, has withdrawn from the race for the next Knesset, the party announced on Friday. Haaretz reported that the announcement followed its own report on allegations of sexual harassment against him, and that Hadash said he would not run in the coming election.

According to the N12 political correspondent Mohammad Magadli, the party said Farah had pulled his candidacy after testimonies were passed to the Hadash leadership containing claims of alleged sexual harassment and of inappropriate conduct toward women in recent years. Farah had been placed fourth on the Joint List slate, the position Hadash allotted him within the wider alliance.

Where he stood on the lists

Israeli Knesset elections are run on a nationwide party-list system: voters choose a list rather than a local representative, and seats are filled from the top of each list downward. That makes a candidate's numbered slot the single most important fact about their chances. Ynet reported that Farah held the second slot on the Hadash list and the fourth slot on the Joint List. The political commentator Amit Segal described him as number two in Hadash in announcing the withdrawal.

What Hadash is

Hadash, an acronym in Hebrew for the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, is a communist party with a majority-Arab membership and a small Jewish component, as Haaretz described it in its report. It is one of the constituent factions of the Joint List, the alliance of predominantly Arab parties that has run together in several Israeli election cycles in order to clear the electoral threshold and maximise its combined seat count. Because the alliance pools candidates from several parties into one ranked slate, each member party negotiates how many of its own people appear in realistic positions, which is why Farah's placement is reported twice: once on the internal Hadash list and once on the joint slate that voters would actually see on the ballot.

The party's statement

Ynet reported that in its announcement Hadash defended Farah and praised him, crediting him with what it called great "responsibility and courage" in the way he stepped aside. The party framing sits alongside the substance of the withdrawal itself, and the reports do not present the two as contradictory or reconcile them.

The reports differ slightly in how they describe the trigger. Haaretz stated that the party moved after its own published report on the allegations. N12 attributed the decision to testimonies delivered to the Hadash leadership. The Telegram alert from News.co.il said simply that Farah was withdrawing from the Hadash list for the next Knesset because of claims of sexual harassment against him, without specifying who received them. Ynet said he was compelled to withdraw against the background of testimony about sexual harassment. These accounts are not mutually exclusive, but they are not identical, and none of the reports sets out a sequence of who knew what and when.

How this fits Israeli election practice

Party slates in Israel are typically finalised and submitted to the Central Elections Committee weeks before polling day, and changes after that point are constrained. A candidate stepping down before the list is locked in allows the party to reorder the remaining names, moving everyone below the vacated slot up by one place. The reports do not state whether the Hadash and Joint List slates have already been formally filed, nor who would move into the positions Farah vacated.

Allegations reported by the press against candidates during an Israeli campaign are handled by parties internally in the first instance. Nothing in the material indicates that a criminal complaint has been filed, that police are involved, or that any investigative body outside the party has examined the testimonies.

What the reports do not say

The material published so far leaves substantial gaps. It does not describe the specific conduct alleged, the number of people who gave testimony, the period the accounts cover, or how the testimonies reached the Hadash leadership. It contains no response from Farah himself: no denial, no admission and no statement of his own beyond the party's characterisation of his decision.

Nor do the reports say whether Hadash conducted any internal inquiry before the announcement, whether the party had received complaints earlier, or what if any further steps it intends to take. There is no indication of whether the Joint List as an alliance was consulted, and no date is given for when the reordered slate will be published. The allegations remain allegations as reported, and the details of them rest at this stage on the account published by Haaretz and on the testimonies described by N12.