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JERUSALEM =97 When the leader of Israel's religious-Zionist Meimad Party
recently addressed a meeting of 800 high-school students in a Tel Aviv
suburb, his words on the virtue of Israeli democracy for all its
citizens were drowned out by student chants of "Death to the Arabs."

Not since the days of the now-illegal Kach party, and Baruch Goldstein
killing 29 Muslims at prayer in Hebron in 1994, has Rabbi Michael
Melchior heard such anti-Arab sentiment.

But that sentiment is swelling, and the controversial former cabinet
minister Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beitenu party are riding
the wave. They have emerged as the biggest political winners from the
recent war on Gaza. Their unequivocal anti-Arab policies have never
been more popular.

It was Mr. Lieberman who led the recent campaign to have Israel's two
Arab political parties banned from next month's Knesset election. He
argued that their public criticism of Israel's assault on Hamas in
Gaza constituted a disloyalty to the country as a Jewish and Zionist
state.

Mr. Lieberman has long argued that all Arab Israelis should be made to
swear an oath of loyalty to the country and, if they don't, they
should lose their citizenship.

The country's highest court ruled in favour of the Arab parties, but
not before the Knesset's central elections committee voted in favour
of the ban. Even representatives of the mainstream Likud, Kadima and
Labour parties cast ballots supporting the ban.

"The court has effectively given the Arab parties a licence to kill
the state of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state," Mr. Lieberman
said, adding that his party would not give up the fight.

Besides loyalty oaths, his party wants to exchange Arab communities in
Israel for Israeli settlements in the West Bank; it says that giving
up any land in exchange for peace with Arab neighbours is
"fundamentally flawed" and should not be pursued; and it argues that
Jordan should be where Palestinians seek to create a state.

Public opinion surveys indicate that a growing number of Israelis
support this approach; Yisrael Beitenu is poised to win 16 seats in
the Feb. 10 vote (it currently has 11), as many seats as Labour might
win.

More importantly, the party could be a coalition partner in an
expected Likud government - something that would put Mr. Lieberman in
a good position to promote his agenda.

"Yisrael Beitenu's rise, with its racist agenda, is a very dangerous
trend in Israeli society," said Mohammad Darawshe, an Arab from the
Israeli town of Nazereth who is co-director of the Abraham Fund, an
organization that promotes co-operation among Israeli Arabs and Jews.

The anti-Arab trend is particularly strong among the young generation,
Mr. Darawshe said. "In a poll conducted in May, more than 60 per cent
of Jewish high-school kids say they want to control the political
participation of Arabs in Israel; they're not ready to live in the
same apartment building as Arab citizens; they don't like to hear the
sound of Arabic language; and so on," he said. This racism "has to be
taken seriously and dealt with seriously," Mr. Darawshe said, "as must
separatism in the Arab community." A growing number of Israeli Arabs
want to opt out of Israeli society, including boycotting elections, he
said.

"Unfortunately, [the two trends] have common agendas; they feed off each ot=
her."

Even Foreign Minister and Kadima party leader Tzipi Livni shocked many
by saying that if people don't like what the government is doing "they
can leave."

Overall, Israel's Arab population, while sympathetic to the plight of
Gazans, is not particularly radicalized, certainly not as it was in
the early days of the 2000-2004 Palestinian uprising. Yet, as Mr.
Darawshe says, anti-Arab sentiment in the country has never been
greater. The Lieberman party "ultimately seeks a direct clash with the
Arab citizens in Israel" he said. And he worries that "there's no
serious effort to stop it."

The 100 people at the Yisrael Beitenu rally for English-speaking
voters Thursday night in Jerusalem certainly don't want to stop it.
"It's the clarity of it that's so appealing," said Yona Triestman, a
thirtysomething who works helping new immigrants settle in Israel. And
the message certainly is straightforward. At the end of the night, Uzi
Landau, a former Likud cabinet minister now running for Yisrael
Beitenu, leaned forward and wagged his index finger at the audience.
"There's just one thing you have to remember about our platform," he
said, "just one thing to tell your friends: 'No loyalty, no
citizenship.' "