Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is back to his old tricks, being a great spoiler of all efforts to restart peace talks between his government and the Palestinians.

Lieberman is once again proposing the redrawing of Israel’s borders with the Palestinian territories, with a view to placing more Arab Israelis under Palestinian control in return for plans to annex parts of the West Bank. He also wants to strip as many Arab Israelis of Israeli citizenship as possible.

The desired outcome, of course, is to dramatically reduce the size of the Arab population in Israel by getting rid of as many Arabs as possible.

This is ethnic cleansing, whichever way one looks at it. Arabs, although accustomed to the West turning a blind eye to Israel’s crimes, still wonder how far Israel has to go for the world to take notice, if not action.

The drive for territorial aggrandisement through annexation of Palestinian lands sends the clear signal that Israel has no intention to allow the establishment of a Palestinian state, a stand that flies in the face of proclamations to the contrary.

The timing of such submissions as scenarios for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is telling; they came just after the resumption of peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians.

Even if Lieberman’s ideas do not necessarily reflect the official policy of his government, the fact that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not take time to refute them or dissociate himself from them makes them all the more ominous.

What Lieberman is saying, and has been saying all along over the past years, is a faithful reflection of the inner thoughts of his government. Israel has been entertaining such thoughts ever since it realised that the rapid rise of the Arab population, due to natural growth, is a threat to its long-term survival, so and wants nothing less than the forced transfer of most of Arab population to Arab lands in order to keep Israel as much a Jewish state as possible.

This is the time, therefore, for the international community to speak out against such sinister and diabolic policies.

It is also time for the Palestinians to press the Israeli government to express itself in no uncertain terms on Lieberman’s roadmap to disaster.