Lieberman Gives Serious Ideas a Bad Name

Avigdor Lieberman, the new foreign minister, is perhaps most notorious for his policy demands regarding the Arab citizens of Israel. He wants Israeli Arabs to prove their loyalty to the state by taking oaths and performing national service, otherwise he would deny them citizenship. And he wants to move the Green Line - the pre-1967 border between Israel and the West Bank - so that Arab villages in the Triangle and Wadi Ara areas become part of Palestine and their residents become Palestinian instead of Israeli.

At their core - if we could strip them of racist exaggeration - some of Lieberman's ideas might be worth discussing. Indeed, at their core these policy proposals are not originally his.

In embracing and distorting them, Lieberman appears to be motivated by an angry racist nationalism that used to be foreign to Israel but that sells well with his constituents, who are primarily from the former Soviet Union.