Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's foreign minister, recently startled his fellow cabinet ministers - and Middle East analysts everywhere - with a proposal that Israel end its status as an occupying power in the Gaza Strip and allow Hamas to establish an independent Palestinian state in that enclave.
Most everyone dismissed Lieberman's suggestion out of hand, coming as it did from a man derisively referred to by his Israeli critics as "the bouncer from Kishinev" (having in fact been employed as a night club bouncer in the Moldavian capital before emigrating to Israel).
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