Bitan petitions Likud court to keep primaries and block leadership committee

Likud lawmaker David Bitan filed an urgent petition on Sunday morning to the party’s internal court, asking it to stop the creation of a “selected committee” and ensure the party’s Knesset slate is chosen in primaries as planned. As of now, no hearing date has been set.

In the petition, filed by attorney Yifat Meirovitz-Yafet, Bitan calls the move a “constitutional takeover.” He argues that changing the selection process only about a month before the scheduled vote is an improper attempt to rewrite the rules in the middle of the game. He says it violates the rights of tens of thousands of Likud members, contradicts the party constitution, and breaches earlier decisions by the court. Bitan warned, “They must not take away the members’ democratic right to choose their representatives,” and said Likud must remain a democratic movement in which members decide, not an appointed committee.

The petition seeks a temporary injunction against any effort to cancel the primaries or establish the committee, says any constitutional change should apply only to future elections, and demands that any vote on constitutional amendments at the Likud conference be secret. Bitan also relies on recent rulings this month that, he says, clearly ordered primaries and limited the conference to approving the rules for them.

He further argues that the change would harm candidates and activists who already invested time and resources under the existing system, concentrate power in the hands of a few influencers, and could expose Likud to lawsuits for refunds of membership fees totaling about 30 million shekels. The dispute comes amid turmoil over the party’s legal representation, after attorney Avi Halevy resigned last week following a clash with CEO David Sharan and people around Benjamin Netanyahu. Halevy’s replacement, attorney Ilan Bombach, has taken the opposite position and asked to overturn a district court injunction on the conference. The fight over the primaries is now playing out in parallel in the district court and the Likud court.