Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them.

In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B.

The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories).

In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long.

The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.

John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector.

The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.

Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago.

Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid.

Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority".

Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations.

"Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."

Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops.

“All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive.

Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him.

“I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.”

Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay.

“It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.”

He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?”

Illegal annexation

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community.

Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect.

“After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote.

Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation.

Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce.

Extreme poverty

Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower.

While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

“How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”.

“Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked.

“You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS.

Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities.

Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn.

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent.

“Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found.

Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population.

To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones.

It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services.

“Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER).

Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”

The ongoing political upheaval that began in Tunisia and successfully spread to Egypt and elsewhere in the region reflects a growing desire among the peoples of the Middle East to live in free and democratic societies. After decades of suffering under non-democratic rule, they have finally begun to emerge from state-administered repression imposed by governments backed by the United States.

The rest of the Arab peoples also hope to achieve freedom and break from the confines of totalitarian states. Some Arab states are, in fact, even more problematic than Egypt and Tunisia. Their citizens deserve freedom and democratic reform, too.

Recent developments provide a challenge to President Obama and American policy makers, but they also offer an extraordinary opportunity to revise America's decades-old, failed policies in the Middle East and to stand clearly on the right side of history. In the streets of Cairo, demonstrators asked why the American government didn't speak out earlier, more forcefully and unequivocally on the side of those brave young Egyptians who demanded their rights and are now raucously celebrating the departure of President Hosni Mubarak. We all admire those young leaders in Tahrir Square. From one side of the Middle East to the other, we hope that "Tahrirization" will spread to other Arab countries - and to Palestinians seeking their rights in Israel.

Government officials of America's other key ally in the region, Israel, look at the wave of popular uprisings and are very worried. Israeli officials frequently boast of being the "only democracy in the Middle East" -- what they don't say is that they would prefer to keep it that way.

While U.S.-sponsored authoritarian regimes in Egypt and Tunisia slip out of America's geopolitical orbit and towards more open and democratic societies, Israel is moving in the opposite direction, as its politics veer to the extreme right and anti-Arab racism and intolerance for dissent increase steadily. Israel's foreign minister wants Palestinian citizens to swear loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state; rabbis on the government payroll call on Jews not to rent property to Palestinians; Israeli schoolteachers complain of rampant and virulent anti-Arab racism amongst their students; new laws to prevent Palestinians from living in so-called community villages are being approved. In short, rights in Israel are being reserved for Jews only.

Unsurprisingly, even for Israeli Jews, democratic freedoms are eroding at an alarming rate. Israeli human rights groups and left-leaning NGOs are under attack from right-wing activists and the most extreme, racist government in Israel's history. The Israeli Knesset will soon open an investigation into the funding of Israeli human rights groups, part of a wider campaign to suppress their work and prevent them from documenting Israeli human rights abuses. The political climate in Israel today resembles the Jim Crow South in the 1950s coupled with the McCarthyism of the time. Conscientious people are refusing to participate in these witch hunts.

Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories suffer many of the same injustices as the peoples of totalitarian regimes and more: torture and abuse at the hands of a repressive state security apparatus; bombardment, white phosphorus, and assassination; systemic inequality, both racial and economic; lack of political freedoms; poverty -- in our case the result of deliberate Israeli government policies. And the same tear gas canisters, made in the U.S., are fired at demonstrators in Cairo, Tunis and the West Bank. Palestinian demonstrators in Israel are shot in the streets.

As Arab popular movements strive to establish democracy and Israeli officials move to constrain civil liberties, it is increasingly clear that calling Israel a democracy is a misnomer. At best, it is an ethnocracy, where only Jews enjoy the full rights and privileges of citizenship. Today, there is a de facto, virtual caste system within the territories that Israel controls, with Israel's Jewish settlers at the top and Muslim and Christian Palestinians in the Occupied Territories at the bottom. Increasingly, people around the world are recognizing this situation for what it is: apartheid. Former Israeli Prime Ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak have both warned of an apartheid future if the status quo is maintained, and pro-Israel columnist Thomas Friedman recently did the same.

Israeli leaders, having failed to use the 30 years of cold peace with Egypt to negotiate Israeli-Palestinian peace, continue to support the least possible change to the Egyptian status quo, afraid of a future where Egyptian civil society restructures its government, external relations, and dealings with the Palestinians. Israel and the US revere so-called "stability" at the expense of peoples denied their rights in Egypt, the Palestinian territories, and Israel itself. This kind of false stability, reminiscent of Cold War era South Africa, should be changed.

Unlike some in the Knesset, I do not believe that there is a threat of another Egyptian-Israeli war. The real danger for Israel is that with democratic change, Arab leaders will be far more likely to listen to their people and demand that Israel adhere to international law vis-a-vis the Palestinians. That would be a tremendous development.

President Obama needs to seize this post-Mubarak moment and break with America's discredited, Israel-first regional approach that has resulted in misguided American support for autocrats. But in re-thinking how it relates to Arab dictators, the Obama administration should also examine the dangers caused by a misshapen Israeli "democracy" trampling the rights of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and Israel alike. Now is the time for a fundamentally new American approach to the Middle East as a whole, predicated on noble American values of freedom and democracy.

Ahmad Tibi is a Palestinian citizen of Israel and is deputy speaker of the Knesset, Israel's parliament.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is toying with the Obama administration, professing an interest in peace while doing his utmost to stymie a just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is no way for Israel to treat its leading ally. Nearly two years into office, Mr. Netanyahu is running circles around President Obama and encircling Jerusalem with still more illegal settlements.

Palestinians are rapidly abandoning hope for a viable and independent state. Mr. Netanyahu's requirements are calculated to be impossible for Palestinian leaders to accept. The Israeli prime minister is always prepared to put in place another demand - such as the self-effacing requirement that the Palestine Liberation Organization recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Meanwhile, he uses delay to further colonize the West Bank and East Jerusalem, disregarding international concerns, the 2003 road map and the feeble requests of his American ally.

But American and Palestinian leaders have seen this game previously from Mr. Netanyahu. This time, they ought to call him on his antics. Instead, the U.S. seems prepared to make the same mistakes as President Clinton - with Dennis B. Ross playing the same central role as "Israel's lawyer" - and Palestinians in the occupied territories are terrified that if they don't play along with the charade they'll be unfairly blamed again for ruining negotiations (going nowhere).

But time is not on Israel's side. The two-state solution is the optimal solution proposed by the international community for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet each passing day of occupation and deepening settlement activity on the land intended for a Palestinian state makes it more difficult to implement the two-state vision. Instead, another possibility is emerging: one state adhering to the democratic principle of one person, one vote for all citizens between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Israel should decide either to end the occupation and accept an independent Palestinian state on the land it occupied in 1967 or face a movement backing one democratic state for all.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton implicitly acknowledged the emerging possibility of one state earlier this month at the Brookings Institution. "The long-term trends that result from the occupation are endangering the Zionist vision of a Jewish and democratic state in the historic homeland of the Jewish people. Israelis should not have to choose between preserving both elements of their dream. But that day is approaching."

Of course that day is approaching, and of course Israel will have to choose between limiting its territory and apartheid. But the matter is more difficult than Mrs. Clinton suggests because we Palestinian citizens of Israel - living in our historic homeland - will not accept a Jewish state that limits our rights. A democratic state, yes, but a Jewish state that is by definition discriminatory, no.

Democratically elected by half the population and led by politicians, many of whom are immigrants whose leading credential for office is that they are Jewish, the Israeli government does not represent a huge segment of the state. The 20 percent of Israelis who are Palestinians increasingly face racist legislation, while the millions of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation do so without equal rights, citizenship or the ability to choose those who make the decisions that ultimately control their lives.

For Palestinians and Israelis alike, it is time to change direction and stop focusing on extending a moribund and mislabeled 19-year-old "peace process" while Israel is relentlessly colonizing the land of the second state. Support for fundamental principles such as civil rights, equality and tolerance of all religions is the key to progress, not enormous American gift packages rewarding Israel for decades of law-breaking. So long as Israel advances laws that promote segregation - and at a record pace under Mr. Netanyahu's coalition government - it should be clear to American negotiators that the prime minister is not serious about peace.

Instead, American leaders must exert concerted pressure on Israel to embrace equality and be prepared to call out Israeli political leaders who thwart such sensible ideals.

This new path forward is one that shifts the dialogue away from unachievable negotiated solutions and focuses on reforming civil society - the revolutionary change of legalizing equality and civil rights. Nonviolent revolutions transformed the American South and apartheid South Africa and can do the same for Israelis and Palestinians.

Civil society reform - or a virtual revolution in the standing and rights of Palestinians - would mean ending the near-impunity for Israeli soldiers who use young Palestinian children as human shields because they see them as lesser beings, punishing landlords and the rabbis egging them on for discrimination in refusing to rent to Palestinians and ending practices denying building permits to Palestinians while accelerating those to Jews. In short, we are calling for equality. Israel should be defined as a state of all its nationalities instead of as a "Jewish state."

The Obama administration could help by changing its role from enabler and funder of Israeli segregation within the 1948 borders and Israeli apartheid in the occupied territories of 1967 to one of helping strengthen civil society by clearly backing a non-racial society based on equality and freedom. If not, our situation could still be transformed if European governments suddenly were seized by concern for the oppressed Palestinian minority in Israel and insisted on basic rights for Palestinians that have been suppressed for decades by Israel.

Efforts are shifting in this direction as the international community is beginning to question Israel's segregationist and apartheid policies. BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) gains momentum each day with the recognition that the "peace process" has been replaced by a discriminatory Israeli government intent on further expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Only by providing equal rights and freedom to all of its citizens and to all those under its rule will Israelis find long-sought security, peace and strength. When we invest in all our people - and not segregationist settlement housing and ever more arms - we will be on the right path forward rather than the current dangerous one that overlooks basic investments such as firefighting and thereby imperils Jews and Palestinians alike.

Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton should get on this path of equal rights and freedom, one that has worked wonders for the United States and South Africa, instead of investing more fruitless hours trying to protect an exclusivist state still determined to secure superior rights for Jews and inferior rights for Palestinians.

Ahmad Tibi is a Palestinian citizen of Israel and deputy speaker of the Knesset, Israel's parliament.

With little surprise, I learned of the recent refusal of Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon to meet with members of the U.S. Congress, whose institution provides Israel with the economic wherewithal to occupy the West Bank. Through astonishing ineptness, rather than principled policy, Israel is risking the anger of its bankroller.

Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III recently noted, "United States taxpayers are giving Israel roughly $3 billion each year, which amounts to something like $1,000 for every Israeli citizen, at a time when our own economy is in bad shape and a lot of Americans would appreciate that kind of helping hand from their own government." Palestinian citizens of Israel scarcely see the American largesse, and Mr. Baker's numbers are somewhat off, but his point is well taken. With Israel's abusive treatment of Palestinians in the territories, inequitable distribution of government funds between Jewish citizens and Palestinian citizens, and the ongoing recession in the United States, it is time to put U.S. aid on the table.

The visiting members of Congress, though staunch supporters of Israel not yet questioning American aid, are beginning to raise questions about Israel's actions against the Palestinians.

Rather than meet with them, Mr. Ayalon lashed out at J Street, the new lobby group that had scheduled the meeting. Mr. Ayalon would never reject a meeting arranged by the American Israel Education Foundation, an offshoot of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, because the organization has not been critical of Israel's subjugation of Palestinians in the West Bank. But now, this serial offender of diplomatic norms and backer of transferring Palestinians from Israel, having learned nothing from his effort to humiliate Turkey's ambassador to Israel, has once again inadvertently managed to highlight the far-right political trend running riot through Israel - and extending itself into occupied Palestinian territory as well as Dubai. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seeks to obscure Israel's daily human rights violations against the Palestinians, Mr. Ayalon seems oddly intent on showing the discriminatory side of Israel.

I am uncertain whether to thank Mr. Ayalon for accidentally and repeatedly exposing Israel's extremism to the world or to criticize him for harboring opinions more in keeping with white viewpoints in apartheid South Africa than a leading diplomat in Israel's Foreign Ministry. His bungling is the gift that keeps on giving in helping make plain to the world the kind of reactionary leaders Israel has chosen to run the country. Mr. Netanyahu holds similar beliefs but is an experienced enough politician to avoid making a public spectacle of himself.

The rejected members of Congress all have an open invitation to my office. In fact, it is my sincere hope that all members of Congress will make a stop at my office a crucial visit when they travel to Jerusalem. There are more than 35 Israeli laws that discriminate against the 20 percent of Israelis who are Palestinians. While we are able to vote and hold office, rank discrimination in all other aspects of life significantly hold us back. Such treatment by Israel merits American censure and calls into question the wisdom and morality of knee-jerk American support for Israel.

We are entering a time period similar to that faced by the United States 50 years ago. Then, at long last, some American allies finally were waking up to the reality of Jim Crow discrimination in the American South and not liking what they saw. Israel's policies are putting it in league with the West's most notoriously racist governments of the past five decades. So far this year, Defense Minister Ehud Barak has warned of Israel becoming "an apartheid state," and Mr. Baker expressed concern that if Israel did not find a "negotiated peace" it could become "an apartheid type of nation." Neither man thought that day had arrived yet, but we Palestinians see it every day with the separation wall running through the West Bank and East Jerusalem and different Israeli laws for Jews and Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Israel's response to its declining international standing, however, is to put out propaganda rather than wrestle with the fundamental injustices meted out to Palestinians every day. The Israeli Information and Diaspora Affairs Ministry earlier this month began handing out Hebrew pamphlets on Israeli airlines to passengers interested in contesting how the state is viewed abroad.

The ministry's approach, also posted online, wrongly suggests that Israelis are monolithic. We are not. Not all Jews agree with the suppression of Palestinians. And certainly almost all Palestinian citizens of Israel oppose the occupation.

An approach that obscures government crimes against Palestinians dallies in simple-minded foolishness and refuses to see our situation as others see it. Israelis don't need to explain away the occupation more effectively but to address it, end it and accept moral culpability for decades of ruling over another people. As for the United States, members of Congress don't need another decade of complicity with Israel's occupation, but the political courage to tell an ally and its associated lobbyists that continued domination of the Palestinians is simply not acceptable in the 21st century.

Ahmad Tibi is a Palestinian citizen of Israel and is deputy speaker of the Knesset, Israel's parliament.

JERUSALEM — The right-wing coalition of the new Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, does not bode well for Palestinians in Israel. With the appointment of Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister, the extremists are going after the indigenous population and threatening us with loyalty tests and the possibility of “transfer” into an area nominally controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

Netanyahu’s intransigence vis-à-vis Palestinians in the occupied territories is certainly cause for concern. No less concerning is what the Netanyahu-Lieberman combination may mean to Palestinian citizens of Israel.

This government, particularly with Lieberman as foreign minister, should be boycotted by the international community, just as it once boycotted Jِrg Haider, the late Austrian far-right politician who won global notoriety for his anti-immigrant views.

Lieberman, in one of many outrageous comments, declared in May 2004 that 90 percent of Israel’s Palestinian citizens “have no place here. They can take their bundles and get lost.”

But my family and I were on this land centuries before Lieberman arrived here in 1978 from Moldova. We are among the minority who managed to remain when some 700,000 Palestinians were forced out by Israel in 1948.

Today, Lieberman stokes anti-Palestinian sentiment with his threat of “transfer” — a euphemism for renewed ethnic cleansing. Henry Kissinger, too, has called for a territorial swap, and Lieberman cites Kissinger to give his noxious idea a more sophisticated sheen. Lieberman and Kissinger envision exchanging a portion of Israel for a portion of the occupied West Bank seized illegally by Jewish settlers.

But Israel has no legal right to any of the occupied Palestinian territories. And Lieberman has no right to offer the land my home is on in exchange for incorporating Jewish settlers into newly defined Israeli state borders. We are citizens of the state of Israel and do not want to exchange our second-class citizenship in our homeland — subject as we are to numerous laws that discriminate against us — for life in a Palestinian Bantustan.

We take our citizenship seriously and struggle daily to improve our lot and overcome discriminatory laws and practices.

We face discrimination in all fields of life. Arab citizens are 20 percent of the population, but only 6 percent of the employees in the public sector. Not one Arab employee is working in the central bank of Israel. Imagine if there was not one African-American citizen employed in the central bank of the United States.

Israel is simultaneously running three systems of government. The first is full democracy toward its Jewish citizens — ethnocracy. The second is racial discrimination toward the Palestinian minority — creeping Jim Crowism. And the third is occupation of the Palestinian territories with one set of laws for Palestinians and another for Jewish settlers — apartheid.

A few weeks ago, Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu Party led the charge in the Israeli Knesset to ban my party — the Arab Movement for Renewal — from participating in the elections. Netanyahu’s Likud also supported the action. The Supreme Court overturned the maneuvers of the politicians. But their attempt to ban our participation should expose Israel’s democracy to the world as fraudulent.

Lieberman’s inveighing against Palestinian citizens of Israel is not new. Less than three years ago, he called for my death and the death of some of my Palestinian Knesset colleagues for daring to meet with democratically elected Palestinian leaders. Speaking before the Knesset plenum, Lieberman stated: “World War II ended with the Nuremberg trials. The heads of the Nazi regime, along with their collaborators, were executed. I hope this will be the fate of the collaborators in this house.” Lieberman now has the power to put his vile views into practice.

We call for more attention from the Obama administration toward the Palestinian minority in Israel. It is a repressed minority suffering from inadequately shared state resources. The enormous annual American aid package to Israel fails almost entirely to reach our community.

Between Netanyahu and Lieberman, the Obama administration will have its hands full. Make no mistake that Netanyahu and Lieberman will press the new administration hard to accept Israeli actions in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem — as well as discriminatory anti-Palestinian actions in Israel itself. Settlements will grow and discrimination deepen. American backbone will be crucial in the months ahead.