ISRAELI FM: WE’LL PAY NON-JEWS TO LEAVE THE COUNTRY

Avigdor Lieberman (Image: Ronen Zvulun/Reuters)

Tel Aviv, 12 Safar 1436/5 December 2014 (MINA) – Arab citizens of Israel should be offered financial incentives to leave the country. This was the view put forward by Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman recently.

“Those (Israeli Arabs) who decide that their identity is Palestinian will be able to forfeit their Israeli citizenship and move and become citizens of the future Palestinian state,” he wrote in the manifesto, entitled Swimming Against the Stream, published on his Facebook page and his party’s website.

“Israel should even encourage them to do so with a system of economic incentives,” he said as quoted by nsnbc.me.

He previously called on Israeli Arabs, who make up about 20 percent of Israel’s 8 million population, to take a loyalty oath if they want to remain in Israel.

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The plans of Lieberman, whose ultra-nationalist party is a core part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, actually amount to the warehousing of the entire non-Jewish population of Israel-Palestine into open prisons (as with Gaza and the West Bank) – devoid of any kind of sovereign rights recognizable by any democratic state.

His statement comes just days after the Israeli cabinet approved, with a majority of 14-7, a bill which formalizes the racial Apartheid of the state by reserving national rights to Jewish citizens alone.

The Jewish Nation State Bill prioritizes maintaining the Jewish character of the state in all matters of law and justice. Key elements of the bill include:

Defining Israel as “the nation-state of the Jewish people” alone.
Jewish law as the inspiration for Israel’s legal system.
Grants automatic citizenship to Jewish people of any nation as Israelis, but not non-Jews.
It reserves communal rights for Jews only. In other words, individual Arabs are equal in the eyes of the law, but their communal rights are not recognized.
Removes Arabic as an official language of the state

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It is clear, beyond all question, that Israeli society is reaching fever pitch in terms of racial tension – and this is spilling over into violence. Lieberman’s proposal is yet another nail in the coffin of any pretense Israel retains of being a democratic state.(T/R04/R03)

Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA)