In 2007 the party's former chairman, Azmi Bishara, was accused of treason while traveling abroad and has been living in exile ever since.
But the representation of all the parties is now in danger from the raised threshold. Over the past 30 years, turnout among Palestinian citizens has dramatically fallen to little more than half of potential voters, as the minority has seen its political demands for equality greeted with a wave of laws entrenching discrimination.
Among the anti-democratic measures passed in recent years are laws that penalize organizations commemorating the Nakba, the Palestinians' dispossession of their homeland in 1948; that provide a statutory basis to admissions committees, whose function is to prevent Palestinian citizens living on most of Israel's territory; and that make it impossible for most Palestinian citizens to bring a Palestinian spouse to live with them in Israel.
Uncompromising stanceLast week, Balad MKs boycotted the opening ceremony of the Knesset, following the summer recess, in protest at Zoabi's treatment.
At a press conference in the parliament, her colleague, Basel Ghattas, warned: "The day is approaching when Arab MKs will think there is no use participating in the political sphere. We are discovering more and more that we are personae non gratae at the Knesset."
On Facebook, Lieberman responded that he hoped the Arab MKs would "carry out this 'threat' as soon as possible."
The increasingly uncompromising stance towards all the Palestinian minority's political factions marks a shift in policy, even for the right.
Although no Israeli government coalition has ever included a Palestinian party, and the Nasserist al-Ard movement was banned in the 1960s, Jewish politicians have generally viewed it as safer to keep the Palestinian parties inside the Knesset.
Analyst Uzi Baram observed in Haaretz that even Menachem Begin, a former hardline prime minister from Netanyahu's Likud party, believed it would be unwise to raise the threshold to keep out Arab parties. If they were excluded, Baram wrote, it was feared "they would resort to non-parliamentary actions."
"Paving the way toward fascism"Zoabi petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court against her suspension from the Knesset in early October. However, the judges suggested she first use an arcane appeal procedure before the Knesset's full plenum to demonstrate she had exhausted all available channels for lifting the suspension.
Israeli legal scholars have noted the irregularities in the ethics committee's decision to impose a record-long suspension on Zoabi. The committee's task is to regulate parliament members' behavior inside the Knesset, not political speech outside it.
Aeyal Gross, a constitutional law professor at Tel Aviv University, warned that the Knesset's treatment of Zoabi was "paving the way towards fascism and tyranny."
Gross noted the extreme severity of the committee's punishment of Zoabi, contrasting it with that of another MK, Aryeh Eldad. In 2008 he called for Ehud Olmert, the prime minister at the time, to be sentenced to death for suggesting that parts of the occupied territories become a Palestinian state.
Eldad was suspended for just one day, even though it was a clear example of incitement to violence in a country where a former prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was murdered by a right-wing extremist, citing similar justification for his actions.
Tyranny of the majorityThe Supreme Court, which has shifted rightwards in recent years, may not be sympathetic to Zoabi's appeal against her suspension.
In September the court jailed Said Nafaa, a former MK from her Balad party, for one year after he was convicted of visiting Syria in 2007 with a delegation of Druze clerics and meeting a Palestinian faction leader in Syria.
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