Adalah: Post-Israeli Elections Investigations of Palestinian Political Leaders for “Suspected Foreign Funding and Vote-Buying” is Politically-Motivated and Being Conducted Without Evidence or Authority

Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel today, 4 November 2026, demanded that the Prime Minister, the head of the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) and the Attorney General immediately halt the Shin Bet’s investigation into alleged foreign funding and vote-buying in the elections for the 26th Knesset.

The demand follows reports that the Shin Bet chief David Zini intends to question four senior Arab party politicians as suspects. The Attorney General has since stated that she has been shown no evidence against them, and that the Shin Bet has spent the past two days holding back investigation materials from the special team set up to examine the allegations.

In its letter, Adalah argued that the investigation exceeds the Shin Bet’s legal mandate. The agency is authorized to thwart threats to the democratic system of government, but it has no power to conduct criminal investigations after an election has already taken place. Such investigations are the responsibility of civilian law enforcement, chiefly the Israel Police, and the Shin Bet may not take them on without explicit statutory authorization.

Adalah also responded to media reports that the Shin Bet chief is seeking to classify the investigation as a “security” matter. Any such attempt, Adalah wrote, has no basis in fact and feeds the Prime Minister’s campaign to cast Palestinian citizens of Israel as the enemy.

Adalah stressed that the real threat to the democratic process comes from the conduct of the Prime Minister and the Shin Bet chief themselves. Their claims of a “stolen election,” their attempt to delay publication of the results, and their use of these allegations as a political weapon against the Arab public’s elected representatives are what endanger public trust in the electoral process and the will of the voters. Far from protecting democracy, this conduct undermines it in the service of plainly political int