Party: Yisrael-Beitenu

Knesset Profile: Avigdor Liberman

Avigdor Lieberman was born in Moldova in the former Soviet Union. In 1978, at the age of 20, he immigrated to Israel and received automatic citizenship under Israel's Law of Return. He now lives in the illegal Nokdin settlement in the occupied West Bank.

A nightclub bouncer turned politician, Lieberman, served as Director General of the Likud Party from 1993 to 1996, and as Director General of the Prime Minister's office from 1996 to 1997. A staunch opponent of the peace process and of any territorial concessions to Palestinians, he resigned this post and left Likud in protest over then-Prime Minister Netanyahu's signing of the U.S.-brokered Wye River Memorandum.

In 1998, Lieberman called for the flooding of Egypt by bombing the Aswan Dam in retaliation for Egyptian support for Yasser Arafat.

In 1999, he founded the Yisrael Beitenu (Israel Our Home) party and was first elected to Knesset. In 2001, as Minister of National Infrastructure, Lieberman proposed that the West Bank be divided into four cantons, with no central Palestinian government and no possibility for Palestinians to travel between the cantons.

In 2002, the Israeli daily Yedioth Achronot quoted Lieberman in a Cabinet meeting saying that the Palestinians should be given an ultimatum that "At 8am we'll bomb all the commercial centers...at noon we'll bomb their gas stations...at two we'll bomb their banks..." In 2003, Haaretz reported that Lieberman called for thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel to be drowned in the Dead Sea and offered to provide the buses to take them there.

In May 2004, Lieberman proposed a plan that called for the transfer of Israeli territory with Palestinian populations to the Palestinian Authority. Likewise, Israel would annex the major Jewish settlement blocs on the Palestinian West Bank. If applied, his plan would strip roughly one-third of Israel's Palestinian citizens of their citizenship. A "loyalty test" would be applied to those who desired to remain in Israel. Those committed to making Israel a state of all its citizens, including the Palestinian minority, would be stripped of voting rights. This plan to trade territory with the Palestinian Authority is a revision of Lieberman's earlier calls for the forcible transfer of Palestinian citizens of Israel from their land. Lieberman stated in April 2002 that there was "nothing undemocratic about transfer." And in May 2004, he said that 90 percent of Israel's 1.2 million Palestinian citizens would "have to find a new Arab entity" in which to live beyond Israel's borders. "They have no place here. They can take their bundles and get lost," he said.

Furthermore, in May 2006, Lieberman called for the killing of Arab members of Knesset who meet with members of the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority. Lieberman championed a recent bill adopted by Israel's Cabinet that raises the minimum a party must achieve to enter Knesset from 2 percent to 10 percent. This would eliminate parties representing Palestinian citizens of Israel, whose combined strength has never reached 10 percent.

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