It leaves a "constant threat" of expulsion hanging over the heads of the minority as a way to crush political activity and demands for reform, he wrote on the Hebrew website Local Call. And at the same time it casts Palestinian citizens out into a "territorial and governmental emptiness."
Inevitably, the plan revives fears among Palestinian citizens of the Nakba, the Arabic word for "catastrophe": the mass expulsions that occurred during the 1948 war to create Israel on the ruins of the Palestinian homeland.
Jabareen observed that the population swap implied that Palestinian citizens "are part of the enemy. It says we don't belong in our homeland, that our future is elsewhere."
Backing from Kissinger
The idea of an exchange of populated land was first formalized by Lieberman in 2004, when he unveiled what he grandly called a "Separation of the Nations" program. It quickly won supporters in the US, including elder statesman Henry Kissinger.
The idea of a land and population swap, sometimes termed "static transfer," was alluded to by former prime ministers, including Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, at around the same time.
But only Lieberman set out a clear plan. He suggested stripping as many as 300,000 Palestinians in the Triangle of their Israeli citizenship.
Other Palestinian citizens would be expected to make a "loyalty oath" to Israel as a "Jewish Zionist state" or face expulsion to a Palestinian state. The aim was to achieve two states that were as "ethnically pure" as possible.
Jabareen noted that Lieberman's populated-land exchange falsely equated the status and fate of Palestinians who are legal citizens of Israel with Jewish settlers living in the West Bank in violation of international law.
Lieberman exposed his plan to a bigger audience in 2010, when he addressed the United Nations as foreign minister in the first of Netanyahu's series of recent governments. Notably, at that time, the prime minister's advisers distanced him from the proposal.
Internment campA month after Lieberman's speech, it emerged that Israeli security services had carried out secret exercises based on his scenario. They practiced quelling massive civil disturbances following a peace deal that required redrawing the borders to expel large numbers of Palestinian citizens.
Behind the scenes, other Israeli officials are known to have supported more limited populated-land swaps.
Documents leaked in 2011 revealed that three years earlier the centrist government of Ehud Olmert had advanced just such a population exchange during peace talks.
Tzipi Livni, then the foreign minister, had proposed moving the border so that several villages in Israel would end up in a future Palestinian state. Notably, however, Umm al-Fahm and other large communities nearby were not mentioned.
The political sympathies between Lieberman and Livni, the latter widely seen as a peacemaker by the international community, were nonetheless evident.
In late 2007, as Israel prepared for the Annapolis peace conference, Livni described a future Palestinian state as "the answer" for Israel's Palestinian citizens. She said it was illegitimate for them to seek political reforms aimed at ending Israel's status as a "home unto the Jewish people."
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